Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: Aquillion on January 29, 2015, 03:10:29 pm
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Since temples are apparently being added to Dwarf Mode, it seems like a good idea to post ideas for them. Some of these might seem obvious, but it's still fun to write them down.
Dwarves will apparently visit temples or taverns based on their personality. Temples, I assume, should require a priest or priests; the higher the priest's social skills, the more they can improve the mood of the dwarves who visit.
Dwarves are probably generally more likely to go to taverns than temples, but one idea that I think would be cool and realistic would be if dwarves facing extreme pressures or tragedy are more likely to go to temples (assuming their personalities or beliefs aren't totally opposed to it, of course) -- there are people in the real world who consider themselves technically religious but only get involved on major holidays or major life-events, after all. More importantly, though, this would make temples valuable for the same reason they often were in real life -- dwarves facing extreme grief from a recent loss could go there to receive comfort from the priest, reducing the chance that they'll tantrum. Eventually, perhaps, there could even be more formal funerals than we have now, where all the dead dwarf's loved ones attend and the priest (and maybe other people who knew the dwarf) gives an eulogy which can help manage mood -- of course, if someone does terribly on the eulogy it could make things worse.
Possibly priests could also have a skill for religious or supernatural knowledge, which gives them a chance to spot or harm vampires and a chance to successfully exorcise ghosts; this skill would also improve the quality of the temple as a sanctuary -- a priest who is highly skilled at rituals could keep the undead from entering, and civilian dwarves could automatically flee to there if they see undead. Of course, this depends on exactly what powers religions have in Dwarf Fortress, but exorcisms, spotting vampires, and providing sanctuary against undead seem logical. An extremely skilled priest might even provide temporary sanctuary against the dreaded clowns, although I doubt it would hold up for long.
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The latter suggestions seem like more complex magic system features, kind of getting ahead of ourselves. The consolation and ritual stuff seems p. interesting though.
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What about Clergy arranged Marriages? Could make for some interesting Legendary mode stories.
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What about Clergy arranged Marriages? Could make for some interesting Legendary mode stories.
Oooh, I'd love arranged marriages. That would make breeding superdwarves very easy, and it'll also allow us to create specific family trees. +1 to this, though it doesn't necessarily have to happen in a temple
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So would clergy be a type of noble? Appearing on the nobles screen, demanding fancy rooms, and all that? Or would it just be a job, so that a dwarf could have Masonry, Diagnosing, and Service Leading enabled? Or- Wait a minute! Maybe it could vary from god to god: for example, a temple for the Dwarven got of wealth requires an elected/appointed head-priest dwarf who insists that his god will not be happy unless his VIP clergydwarf has an opulent throne room with 50 chests; while on the other hand, followers of the goddess of plump-helmets can just pick any adult Dwarf out of the congregation to lead that day's service. That would give it some nice variety, doncha think?
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So would clergy be a type of noble? Appearing on the nobles screen, demanding fancy rooms, and all that? Or would it just be a job, so that a dwarf could have Masonry, Diagnosing, and Service Leading enabled? Or- Wait a minute! Maybe it could vary from god to god: for example, a temple for the Dwarven got of wealth requires an elected/appointed head-priest dwarf who insists that his god will not be happy unless his VIP clergydwarf has an opulent throne room with 50 chests; while on the other hand, followers of the goddess of plump-helmets can just pick any adult Dwarf out of the congregation to lead that day's service. That would give it some nice variety, doncha think?
That sounds pretty cool too. Demanding statues/other stuff related to the spheres would be cool too. Followers of the god of wealth might demand golden statues, while followers of the god of war might demand weapon racks or armor stands
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So would clergy be a type of noble? Appearing on the nobles screen, demanding fancy rooms, and all that? Or would it just be a job, so that a dwarf could have Masonry, Diagnosing, and Service Leading enabled? Or- Wait a minute! Maybe it could vary from god to god: for example, a temple for the Dwarven got of wealth requires an elected/appointed head-priest dwarf who insists that his god will not be happy unless his VIP clergydwarf has an opulent throne room with 50 chests; while on the other hand, followers of the goddess of plump-helmets can just pick any adult Dwarf out of the congregation to lead that day's service. That would give it some nice variety, doncha think?
This means putting the clergy on the nobles screen, but having their requirements vary by religion and probably scale with progress triggers and the number of worshipers.
It should be possible to build a shrine with no clergy, though one of the serious worshipers might appoint herself the role of "clergy" there. Such a self-appointed cleric would not have any residence requirements, but the "office" requirement (the mini-temple) would have minimum requirements before it functions properly.
As the god system matures, they might start to have personality quirks that could be reflected in their demands for temples and/or clergy lodgings. Ideally, demands will be more flexible... such as "rose gold figurine" could be partially satisfied with any figurine. Some things might be explicitly banished from a temple zone... The Temple of Zog requires 6 tables and six chairs, but they cannot be featherwood.
It could get unworkable if gods are jealous of each others' temples... Zog wants the most opulent temple in the fort. And so does Thrin.
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So would clergy be a type of noble? Appearing on the nobles screen, demanding fancy rooms, and all that? Or would it just be a job, so that a dwarf could have Masonry, Diagnosing, and Service Leading enabled? Or- Wait a minute! Maybe it could vary from god to god: for example, a temple for the Dwarven got of wealth requires an elected/appointed head-priest dwarf who insists that his god will not be happy unless his VIP clergydwarf has an opulent throne room with 50 chests; while on the other hand, followers of the goddess of plump-helmets can just pick any adult Dwarf out of the congregation to lead that day's service. That would give it some nice variety, doncha think?
This means putting the clergy on the nobles screen, but having their requirements vary by religion and probably scale with progress triggers and the number of worshipers.
It should be possible to build a shrine with no clergy, though one of the serious worshipers might appoint herself the role of "clergy" there. Such a self-appointed cleric would not have any residence requirements, but the "office" requirement (the mini-temple) would have minimum requirements before it functions properly.
As the god system matures, they might start to have personality quirks that could be reflected in their demands for temples and/or clergy lodgings. Ideally, demands will be more flexible... such as "rose gold figurine" could be partially satisfied with any figurine. Some things might be explicitly banished from a temple zone... The Temple of Zog requires 6 tables and six chairs, but they cannot be featherwood.
It could get unworkable if gods are jealous of each others' temples... Zog wants the most opulent temple in the fort. And so does Thrin.
Well pick a side or just don't build a Temple to start with, +1.
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There's one thing in the first post I don't agree with. A small and drecreasing number of people "pratise" their religion nowadays but it wasn't always so. I think it's because of a generalized lack of faith.
Dwarves should be about as likely to go to the tavern as to the temple, if not more, because they live in a deeply magical world where their gods are pretty real, active and powerful. Religious duties would be taken very seriously in any civilization where the gods are such a big part of daily life.
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There's one thing in the first post I don't agree with. A small and drecreasing number of people "pratise" their religion nowadays but it wasn't always so. I think it's because of a generalized lack of faith.
Dwarves should be about as likely to go to the tavern as to the temple, if not more, because they live in a deeply magical world where their gods are pretty real, active and powerful. Religious duties would be taken very seriously in any civilization where the gods are such a big part of daily life.
While the gods in dwarf fortress are real, they're nowehre near as active as you're saying they are. A few gods release demons at the start of time, then maybe once every hundred years somebody profanes a temple and a god curses them, or even rarer somebody gets a god of death to give them necromantic powers. It's actually really common for at least half the gods in a pantheon to do absolutely nothing at any point in history. Anyway, based off of what Toady said it doesn't seemlike taverns and temples are competing for the same spot in dwarves' lives. Dwarves go to temples with a frequency probably depending on how religious they are (which is something already tracked by the game you have dubious worshippers, casual worshippers, faithful worshippers, and more). Then all dwarves go to taverns because all dwarves are severe alcoholics.
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Has anyone played Sierra's Pharaoh? It's an old ancient egypt SimCity kind of game that is similar is premise to Dwarf Fortress but very different in execution. One of the features of Pharaoh was its religion system. Each city had a Patron deity, plus other local deities. In the early levels, you might have only your patron god, then 1 or 2 local deities, then eventually you'd have to balance all 5. You had Osiris, god of farming (specifically the inundation), Ra, god of trade and social standing, Ptah, god of industry and craft
mandwarfship, Set, god of war, and Bast, god of the home and health. You had the ability to appease gods by building small shrines, large temples or by building a festival square and holding a festival to honor a specific god by spending money and beer. (Fun fact, ancient egypt also ran on booze) An appeased god would give you some sort of blessing, for example, Osiris would increase the inundation and thus crop yields, Bast would fill your homes with pottery and beer that the bitches keep complaining about, Ptah would materialize raw materials in your workshops, Set would smite enemies the second they set foot on your soil and Ra would increase the kingdom rating, which was how you won the game. A neglected or jealous god on the other hand would damage your city according to their theme.
I enjoyed that aspect of Pharaoh and I think it would translate to the worlds of Dwarf Fortress easily enough. Since money doesn't mean anything to a dwarf and the consumption of alcohol is a given, I would suggest sacrificing some kind of item that is meaningful to the deity's realm of influence. Here are some Fun ideas:
God of Metal
Sacrifice: Metal bars, metal objects or metal ores
Boon: Randomly changes existing stone on the map to metal ores; Drops metal bars from the sky; Metal bars in stockpiles come to life and befriend dwarves; type of ore/metal based on what ores are sacrificed.
Smite: Changes existing metal ores to stone; Drops metal bars from the sky; Metal bars in stockpile come to life and attack dwarves; Metal bars in stockpile turn into charcoal.
God of Fire
Sacrifice: Charcoal, coke
Boon: Creates lava tubes; Delivers coke/charcoal; Rains magma from the sky; Protects dwarves & buildings from fire;
Smite: Starts fires; Turns magma under magma workshops into obsidian; Rains magma from the sky;
God of the Wild
Sacrifice: Meat, living animals,
Boon: Sends tame animals to join your fortress; Protects your animals from harm; Animals have more babies; Wild animals attack invaders; Dwarves can control themselves as werebeasts; Change domesticated animals into wilder versions, i.e, dogs into wolves, cows into buffalo, cats into lions, etc.
Smite: Sends unfriendly savage animals to attack your fortress; Protects unfriendly animals from harm; Untrains animals (even domesticated ones); Turns dwarves into werebeasts; Wild animals besiege the fortress; Change domesticated animals into wilder versions and make them unfriendly
God of Farming
Sacrifice: Food, Booze,
Boon: Increase crop yield; Increase yield from milking/shearing/butchering;
Smite: Destroy crops; Kill livestock; Destroy food in stockpiles;
God of Battle
Sacrifice: Prisoners, weapons, armor, blood
Boon: Dwarves perform well in battle; Invaders drop dead, go blind, can't move, etc; Dwarves gain fighting skills more easily;
Smite: Dwarves fight poorly; Powerful enemies, ie ogres, dragons, attack the fortress;
God of Crafts
Sacrifice: Crafts, raw materials i.e. wood, stone, glass, clay, bones, cloth
Boon: Stockpiles fill with materials; craftdwarves' skills improved; Strange moods more common and more successful;
Smite: Raw materials vanish from stockpiles; craftdwarves lose skill levels; Strange moods less successful;
God of Health
Sacrifice: Splints, crutches, thread, traction benches
Boon: Dwarves heal faster; Dwarves resist illness, infection; Dwarves' physical attributes increase, ie, tougher, faster, stronger, etc;
Smite: Syndrome plagues;
God of Undeath
Sacrifice: Dwarves, prisoners, coffins, slabs
Boon: Creates friendly undead; Turns dwarves into vampires; Ghosts less likely to damage dwarves; Ghosts attack invaders/wild animals;
Smite: Zombies; Destroys burial sites, resulting in Ghosts; Turns dwarves into vampires;
God of Destruction
Sacrifice: Dwarves, prisoners, animals
Boon: Turns dwarves into vampires; Turns dwarves into werebeasts; Dwarves gain mutations like claws, stingers, fangs, web spitters, fire breath, etc; Dwarves gain happiness and nourishment from destruction; Dwarves resist destruction themselves;
Smite: Dwarves go berzerk; Syndromes;
God of Wealth
Sacrifice: Coins
Boon: Coins rain from the sky; Masterwork crafts more likely; Materials in stockpiles become better versions, ie, clay becomes fireclay, glass becomes crystal glass, stone becomes obsidian, metals become gold or steel, etc; God Merchants appear; Brokers gain skills faster;
Smite: Lead coins rain from the sky; Brokers lose skills; Merchants get zapped or don't show up; Materials in stockpiles downgrade;
God of Justice
Sacrifice: Chains, Cages,
Boon: Thieves become caged; Invaders become caged; Dwarves that go Berzerk or turn into werebeasts or whatever become caged; More happy thoughts from settling disputes, complaining to leaders, etc;
Smite: Random Dwarves become caged; Creatures escape from cages and chains; Thieves appear;
God of Love
Sacrifice: Clothing, booze
Boon: Dwarves become "good looking"; Dwarves get happy thought from seeing "good looking" dwarves; Dwarves more likely to get married or pursue relationships; Less unhappiness in general;
Smite: Dwarves become depressed or insane; Dwarves become "ugly", causing bad thoughts;
I'm thinking that gods are actually generated with more than one of these fields of influence. So if a given world has 3 gods, I reach for my d12 and generate: Goddess of Destruction and Metal, Goddess of Health and Battle, and God of Undeath and Wealth. That's going to be a Fun planet.
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I like Pharaoh. The basic idea seems pretty good, although some of those boons might sometimes be unwanted: a Dwarf who likes cats and gets adopted by one would be likely be disappointed if his pet became a lion, etc. Although, since losing is fun, having boons that trip you up might be more of a feature than a bug. And of course, running a fort despite hostile gods would be a great challenge for the hardcore set.
What if some of the gods imposed restrictions on their followers? E.G., Urist McReligious is hungry, but he's not allowed to eat plump helmets and that's all the lazy player stocked up on. Depending on his devotion, he might just get an unhappy thought or choose to starve to death instead. Or on the other hand, what if it was only the clergy that imposed restrictions/commands, similar to mandates? That way, your dwarves could do just about anything while you're just getting started, but once you get big enough to install temples, the difficulty ratchets up a bit.
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Yeah, a lot of the boons and smites were intended to be either good or bad. I find it humorous to imagine a Fire God blessing his dwarven followers by flooding them with magma. "You guys like magma, right? Here you go."
I think ideally you would want the option to stay neutral in the cosmic struggle. If you never acknowledge the gods, they won't care about you and give no boons or smites either way. Also, a god's ire may not be dependent on your entire population but on each individual dwarf. So if Urist McFireHater blasphemes against Fire God by putting out fires, Fire God will smite McFireHater by setting his belongings on fire. Meanwhile, McFireHater's neighbor Minkot McFireLover goes to Fire Church and sacrifices charcoal regularly, so Fire God spares her and her belongings from the touch of Fire. Finally, their other neighbor, Tulon McDoesntCare has never blasphemed against nor exhaulted Fire God, so Fire God will never set McDoesntCare's belongings on fire, but also doesn't protect McDoesntcare from the fire that started in McFireHater's bedroom.
Now, that would all be theoretically hilarious to watch, but, given the nature of Dwarf Fortress it would be hard to realize what was going on, and it would probably destroy your framerate to calculate so many little things.
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There's one thing in the first post I don't agree with. A small and drecreasing number of people "pratise" their religion nowadays but it wasn't always so. I think it's because of a generalized lack of faith.
Dwarves should be about as likely to go to the tavern as to the temple, if not more, because they live in a deeply magical world where their gods are pretty real, active and powerful. Religious duties would be taken very seriously in any civilization where the gods are such a big part of daily life.
While the gods in dwarf fortress are real, they're nowehre near as active as you're saying they are. A few gods release demons at the start of time, then maybe once every hundred years somebody profanes a temple and a god curses them, or even rarer somebody gets a god of death to give them necromantic powers. It's actually really common for at least half the gods in a pantheon to do absolutely nothing at any point in history. Anyway, based off of what Toady said it doesn't seemlike taverns and temples are competing for the same spot in dwarves' lives. Dwarves go to temples with a frequency probably depending on how religious they are (which is something already tracked by the game you have dubious worshippers, casual worshippers, faithful worshippers, and more). Then all dwarves go to taverns because all dwarves are severe alcoholics.
They're pretty active, relatively speaking. Look how much attention gods on Earth got for centuries while having done barely anything at all. Moods are also the work of gods. If you lived in a world where gods curse people, create things and are a pretty well established fact, wouldn't you go to the temple frequently to appease them, confess sins or ask for boons?
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I think you should be able to control the amount of influence gods have on the fortress/the world either through init.txt or in Advanced World Gen. Some players like to have most aspects of the fortress be controlled by gods, while others would rather play with gods that only really affect happiness of dwarves or conflicts but couldn't just release a fire storm on your fortress if you don't build them a temple.
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Has anyone played Sierra's Pharaoh? It's an old ancient egypt SimCity kind of game that is similar is premise to Dwarf Fortress but very different in execution. One of the features of Pharaoh was its religion system. Each city had a Patron deity, plus other local deities. In the early levels, you might have only your patron god, then 1 or 2 local deities, then eventually you'd have to balance all 5. You had Osiris, god of farming (specifically the inundation), Ra, god of trade and social standing, Ptah, god of industry and craftmandwarfship, Set, god of war, and Bast, god of the home and health. You had the ability to appease gods by building small shrines, large temples or by building a festival square and holding a festival to honor a specific god by spending money and beer. (Fun fact, ancient egypt also ran on booze) An appeased god would give you some sort of blessing, for example, Osiris would increase the inundation and thus crop yields, Bast would fill your homes with pottery and beer that the bitches keep complaining about, Ptah would materialize raw materials in your workshops, Set would smite enemies the second they set foot on your soil and Ra would increase the kingdom rating, which was how you won the game. A neglected or jealous god on the other hand would damage your city according to their theme.
I enjoyed that aspect of Pharaoh and I think it would translate to the worlds of Dwarf Fortress easily enough. Since money doesn't mean anything to a dwarf and the consumption of alcohol is a given, I would suggest sacrificing some kind of item that is meaningful to the deity's realm of influence. Here are some Fun ideas:
God of Metal
Sacrifice: Metal bars, metal objects or metal ores
Boon: Randomly changes existing stone on the map to metal ores; Drops metal bars from the sky; Metal bars in stockpiles come to life and befriend dwarves; type of ore/metal based on what ores are sacrificed.
Smite: Changes existing metal ores to stone; Drops metal bars from the sky; Metal bars in stockpile come to life and attack dwarves; Metal bars in stockpile turn into charcoal.
God of Fire
Sacrifice: Charcoal, coke
Boon: Creates lava tubes; Delivers coke/charcoal; Rains magma from the sky; Protects dwarves & buildings from fire;
Smite: Starts fires; Turns magma under magma workshops into obsidian; Rains magma from the sky;
God of the Wild
Sacrifice: Meat, living animals,
Boon: Sends tame animals to join your fortress; Protects your animals from harm; Animals have more babies; Wild animals attack invaders; Dwarves can control themselves as werebeasts; Change domesticated animals into wilder versions, i.e, dogs into wolves, cows into buffalo, cats into lions, etc.
Smite: Sends unfriendly savage animals to attack your fortress; Protects unfriendly animals from harm; Untrains animals (even domesticated ones); Turns dwarves into werebeasts; Wild animals besiege the fortress; Change domesticated animals into wilder versions and make them unfriendly
God of Farming
Sacrifice: Food, Booze,
Boon: Increase crop yield; Increase yield from milking/shearing/butchering;
Smite: Destroy crops; Kill livestock; Destroy food in stockpiles;
God of Battle
Sacrifice: Prisoners, weapons, armor, blood
Boon: Dwarves perform well in battle; Invaders drop dead, go blind, can't move, etc; Dwarves gain fighting skills more easily;
Smite: Dwarves fight poorly; Powerful enemies, ie ogres, dragons, attack the fortress;
God of Crafts
Sacrifice: Crafts, raw materials i.e. wood, stone, glass, clay, bones, cloth
Boon: Stockpiles fill with materials; craftdwarves' skills improved; Strange moods more common and more successful;
Smite: Raw materials vanish from stockpiles; craftdwarves lose skill levels; Strange moods less successful;
God of Health
Sacrifice: Splints, crutches, thread, traction benches
Boon: Dwarves heal faster; Dwarves resist illness, infection; Dwarves' physical attributes increase, ie, tougher, faster, stronger, etc;
Smite: Syndrome plagues;
God of Undeath
Sacrifice: Dwarves, prisoners, coffins, slabs
Boon: Creates friendly undead; Turns dwarves into vampires; Ghosts less likely to damage dwarves; Ghosts attack invaders/wild animals;
Smite: Zombies; Destroys burial sites, resulting in Ghosts; Turns dwarves into vampires;
God of Destruction
Sacrifice: Dwarves, prisoners, animals
Boon: Turns dwarves into vampires; Turns dwarves into werebeasts; Dwarves gain mutations like claws, stingers, fangs, web spitters, fire breath, etc; Dwarves gain happiness and nourishment from destruction; Dwarves resist destruction themselves;
Smite: Dwarves go berzerk; Syndromes;
God of Wealth
Sacrifice: Coins
Boon: Coins rain from the sky; Masterwork crafts more likely; Materials in stockpiles become better versions, ie, clay becomes fireclay, glass becomes crystal glass, stone becomes obsidian, metals become gold or steel, etc; God Merchants appear; Brokers gain skills faster;
Smite: Lead coins rain from the sky; Brokers lose skills; Merchants get zapped or don't show up; Materials in stockpiles downgrade;
God of Justice
Sacrifice: Chains, Cages,
Boon: Thieves become caged; Invaders become caged; Dwarves that go Berzerk or turn into werebeasts or whatever become caged; More happy thoughts from settling disputes, complaining to leaders, etc;
Smite: Random Dwarves become caged; Creatures escape from cages and chains; Thieves appear;
God of Love
Sacrifice: Clothing, booze
Boon: Dwarves become "good looking"; Dwarves get happy thought from seeing "good looking" dwarves; Dwarves more likely to get married or pursue relationships; Less unhappiness in general;
Smite: Dwarves become depressed or insane; Dwarves become "ugly", causing bad thoughts;
I'm thinking that gods are actually generated with more than one of these fields of influence. So if a given world has 3 gods, I reach for my d12 and generate: Goddess of Destruction and Metal, Goddess of Health and Battle, and God of Undeath and Wealth. That's going to be a Fun planet.
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With regards to the post about the pharaoh game and the ways there could be a similar system implemented in dwarf fortress I think those are some good ideas but if they were to be present in the game they should be toned-down and pretty rare.
Right now the atmosphere in the game is that while there are fantasy-based creatures in abundance, true magic is rare. I don't know exactly how prevalent Toady wants magic to be but I think I recall him posting about he wants to avoid the whole "industrial magic" feel where magic is everyday commonplace and people don't think much of it.
For the temple in a players fort to cause the gods to enact some sort of miracle should be a rare and momentous event that is recorded in history and maybe happens once or twice in a forts existence, if that. That way it would keep divine acts significant instead of feeling cheap and arcadey. It should be an exciting suprise for the player when it happens instead of the player feeling like "okay I've done this and that so this god did so-and-so and now I have to do this in order to get this god to do that".
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With regards to the post about the pharaoh game and the ways there could be a similar system implemented in dwarf fortress I think those are some good ideas but if they were to be present in the game they should be toned-down and pretty rare.
Right now the atmosphere in the game is that while there are fantasy-based creatures in abundance, true magic is rare. I don't know exactly how prevalent Toady wants magic to be but I think I recall him posting about he wants to avoid the whole "industrial magic" feel where magic is everyday commonplace and people don't think much of it.
For the temple in a players fort to cause the gods to enact some sort of miracle should be a rare and momentous event that is recorded in history and maybe happens once or twice in a forts existence, if that. That way it would keep divine acts significant instead of feeling cheap and arcadey. It should be an exciting suprise for the player when it happens instead of the player feeling like "okay I've done this and that so this god did so-and-so and now I have to do this in order to get this god to do that".
Agreed. This sounds very right.
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I would agree with that philosophy as well. Gods that are too powerful would change the nature of the game entirely, so players should absolutely have the ability to opt out. A "Godly Intervention" parameter at world gen would be a great idea.
An sneakier approach to god powers would be to give gods influence over invisible realms, for example, a Farm God would increase the chance of good crops, or a Battle God would increase a dwarf's ability to dodge or strike, but they don't do anything on the scale of "Set has disemboweled thine enemies, bro" and the player is never told specifically when or if a god is influencing events. All a player can do is build a Battle Church and pray to Battle God and hope it works. And like gods in the real world, the dwarf gods are generally indifferent and only impact events on a whim.
So if we talk numbers for a second, let's say a god's appeasedness level can go from -5 to 5. A Battle God's effect is to increase the % chance a follower's attack will hit. Regardless of appeasedness value, the Battle God will only grant this boon 5% of the time (Nat 20). Appeasedness influences how good the boon is, let's say 10% increase per appeasedness level, so if the Battle God's appeasedness is 3, 1 in every 20 of Urist McBattlePriest's attacks will have a 30% increase in accuracy.
Another mitigator could be that Gods are very specific about who or what they bless. A Farm God might bless one particular farm plot, or a Battle God might bless one particular dwarf or one particular sword or shield. Gods might also send figures like Hercules, Rama, Buddha, Jesus or Brynhild or items like the Ten Commandments, Holy Grail, Sword of Mars or Amulet of Yendor.
Also, since we have Good and Evil biomes already, what about God-biomes or Holy Lands? Each Holy Land would be different depending on the god that influenced it. For example, a Fire God's Holy Land would have rivers and pools of magma, a Farm God's Holy Land would be teeming with wheat, rice and hemp, a Craft God's Holy Land would be full of fire clay, obsidian and rock crystal, and a Love God's Holy Land would be full of oysters, rabbits and rose petals. Keep in mind, each God has two domains, so you'd really be getting something like a Fire-Love-God's Holy Land of magma and rabbits. A god should also be extra aware of any dwarves that enter their holy land and maybe also extra powerful in the vicinity.
Another thing that occurs to me is that gods should have personality generators just like dwarves do. If you're a fan of mythology, you'll often see gods having very distinctive moods and ways of dealing with their problems. Some gods might be extra indifferent, while others are nosy and try to intervene a lot, while others just smite dwarves out of boredom.
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I would agree with that philosophy as well. Gods that are too powerful would change the nature of the game entirely, so players should absolutely have the ability to opt out. A "Godly Intervention" parameter at world gen would be a great idea.
An sneakier approach to god powers would be to give gods influence over invisible realms, for example, a Farm God would increase the chance of good crops, or a Battle God would increase a dwarf's ability to dodge or strike, but they don't do anything on the scale of "Set has disemboweled thine enemies, bro" and the player is never told specifically when or if a god is influencing events. All a player can do is build a Battle Church and pray to Battle God and hope it works. And like gods in the real world, the dwarf gods are generally indifferent and only impact events on a whim.
So if we talk numbers for a second, let's say a god's appeasedness level can go from -5 to 5. A Battle God's effect is to increase the % chance a follower's attack will hit. Regardless of appeasedness value, the Battle God will only grant this boon 5% of the time (Nat 20). Appeasedness influences how good the boon is, let's say 10% increase per appeasedness level, so if the Battle God's appeasedness is 3, 1 in every 20 of Urist McBattlePriest's attacks will have a 30% increase in accuracy.
Another mitigator could be that Gods are very specific about who or what they bless. A Farm God might bless one particular farm plot, or a Battle God might bless one particular dwarf or one particular sword or shield. Gods might also send figures like Hercules, Rama, Buddha, Jesus or Brynhild or items like the Ten Commandments, Holy Grail, Sword of Mars or Amulet of Yendor.
Also, since we have Good and Evil biomes already, what about God-biomes or Holy Lands? Each Holy Land would be different depending on the god that influenced it. For example, a Fire God's Holy Land would have rivers and pools of magma, a Farm God's Holy Land would be teeming with wheat, rice and hemp, a Craft God's Holy Land would be full of fire clay, obsidian and rock crystal, and a Love God's Holy Land would be full of oysters, rabbits and rose petals. Keep in mind, each God has two domains, so you'd really be getting something like a Fire-Love-God's Holy Land of magma and rabbits. A god should also be extra aware of any dwarves that enter their holy land and maybe also extra powerful in the vicinity.
Another thing that occurs to me is that gods should have personality generators just like dwarves do. If you're a fan of mythology, you'll often see gods having very distinctive moods and ways of dealing with their problems. Some gods might be extra indifferent, while others are nosy and try to intervene a lot, while others just smite dwarves out of boredom.
Good Point, Perhaps there should be a parameter to determine how much Gods actually care about the world you've generated.
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Also, since we have Good and Evil biomes already, what about God-biomes or Holy Lands? Each Holy Land would be different depending on the god that influenced it. For example, a Fire God's Holy Land would have rivers and pools of magma, a Farm God's Holy Land would be teeming with wheat, rice and hemp, a Craft God's Holy Land would be full of fire clay, obsidian and rock crystal, and a Love God's Holy Land would be full of oysters, rabbits and rose petals. Keep in mind, each God has two domains, so you'd really be getting something like a Fire-Love-God's Holy Land of magma and rabbits. A god should also be extra aware of any dwarves that enter their holy land and maybe also extra powerful in the vicinity.
Not all gods have multiple spheres, and two isn't the maximum amount possible. I looked at five random human civilizations from the same world in world generation and got 38 total deities. 13 had only one sphere, 14 had two, 6 had three spheres, 2 had five spheres, 1 had six spheres, and 2 of them had a total of seven spheres. So the amount can vary a lot, and I doubt seven is the maximum amount, though that would be interesting to know. Also most of the time gods have related spheres. You probably won't find a god of fire and love, and you for sure will never find one of fire and water. Generally if you get a god of love it'll also be something related to that like fertility, or pregnancy, then from there it could also have birth or children as spheres. In my experience the ones with huge amount of spheres are gods of fertility, and pregnancy, and all that, or something like twilight, dreams, lightning, nightmares, and spheres related to those.
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It would be neat if some gods required specific objects or decorations in their temples, with more important temples having additional requirements. For example, the Old Testament actually spends more page space describing how the Ark of the Covenant, the enclosing temple/tent, and priestly clothes should be all be decorated than it does on the story of Noah's Ark.
EDIT: More on this train of thought. Much of it may have to wait until more work on global economic stuff. A god might define temple requirements at the start of history, or it could decree them in rare events at a later date. Any material requirements would be things available to the civ at that time of the decree, or known by the civ to exist in a nearby location -- a particularly religious civilization might start wars to appease a god if they don't have any microcline for the sky god's temples but the folks across the river do. This could also tie into starting scenarios, making a new outpost to mine zinc for brass statues because your civ's running out.
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At one point I made a DF hack script that worked kind of like the Pharaoh system you described, however it worked on a 'gods need prayer badly' system.
Basically each god has two values describing their relationship with a site: influence and happiness. Influence determines how much power a god has over a site, while happiness determines how it feels about the site. Both increase as your dwarves serve in the temple, and both decrease as you neglect service, but happiness goes up and down faster than influence. So if you never set up a temple in the first place, nothing happens. If you serve for a long time, you get more powerful blessings. However, if you stop worshipping a god that was already highly influential, you can suffer some nasty smiting for a while. But if you endure the smiting, eventually the god's influence level fizzles out.
Of course, the spheres involved can make some gods trickier to deal with than others. Gods related to fire are particularly fun, since they tend to 'help' you by lighting enemies on fire, which can easily start wildfires. And war gods make sieges more common whether they are trying to help you or hurt you (but for blessings they increase the luck of your soldiers, for a curse they do the opposite). Of course if you choose to worship a god of war you probably enjoy fighting.
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Also, since we have Good and Evil biomes already, what about God-biomes or Holy Lands? Each Holy Land would be different depending on the god that influenced it. For example, a Fire God's Holy Land would have rivers and pools of magma, a Farm God's Holy Land would be teeming with wheat, rice and hemp, a Craft God's Holy Land would be full of fire clay, obsidian and rock crystal, and a Love God's Holy Land would be full of oysters, rabbits and rose petals. Keep in mind, each God has two domains, so you'd really be getting something like a Fire-Love-God's Holy Land of magma and rabbits. A god should also be extra aware of any dwarves that enter their holy land and maybe also extra powerful in the vicinity.
Another thing that occurs to me is that gods should have personality generators just like dwarves do. If you're a fan of mythology, you'll often see gods having very distinctive moods and ways of dealing with their problems. Some gods might be extra indifferent, while others are nosy and try to intervene a lot, while others just smite dwarves out of boredom.
Good and Evil biomes are definitely a placeholder, destined to break out into Spheres at some point. I'd like to see every creature/plant/material tagged with Sphere weights to lend additional flavor, but that's a separate suggestion.
Sphere-related gods should definitely have their power affected by the Sphere ratings of a biome. The other type of god in the game, Forces, are currently limited to specific geographic features... maybe their influence is more all-or-nothing than the Sphere gods.
I also like the idea of a personality generator for gods, though it shouldn't be a carbon copy of the mortal personality engine. The complicated bit comes when deciding whether gods can affect each other, or only act through mortal proxies. Heavenly battles sound heroic and all, but it seems unfair and unfun having the batteries run out of the fort's intricate mega-temple for reasons beyond the player's control.
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I also like the idea of a personality generator for gods, though it shouldn't be a carbon copy of the mortal personality engine. The complicated bit comes when deciding whether gods can affect each other, or only act through mortal proxies. Heavenly battles sound heroic and all, but it seems unfair and unfun having the batteries run out of the fort's intricate mega-temple for reasons beyond the player's control.
What if the results of the struggles in the heavens could be influenced by actions taken in the material world?
If gods grow stronger the more they are worshiped, a player might be able to increase the chance of a god winning a particular battle by increasing that god's worship. This could, in turn, affect that god's 'sphere effect' on the region.
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I also like the idea of a personality generator for gods, though it shouldn't be a carbon copy of the mortal personality engine. The complicated bit comes when deciding whether gods can affect each other, or only act through mortal proxies. Heavenly battles sound heroic and all, but it seems unfair and unfun having the batteries run out of the fort's intricate mega-temple for reasons beyond the player's control.
What if the results of the struggles in the heavens could be influenced by actions taken in the material world?
If gods grow stronger the more they are worshiped, a player might be able to increase the chance of a god winning a particular battle by increasing that god's worship. This could, in turn, affect that god's 'sphere effect' on the region.
Oh I agree, this is a very fun avenue for a player to pursue. I just don't think it'd be very fun to have it happen to the fort's god because of a bunch of stuff happening off-screen. Allowing the player to do it but not suffer from it seems gamey.
Now, maybe just scale the range of effects with the general god-influence game setting and it becomes an acceptable risk for the player... just keep the default something noticeable but not debilitating.
Ultimately, I'd love to see the alternate-planes-of-existence feature set allow an Adventurer to lead an army to storm a god directly. Defeat would be highly likely, and very painful. Victory could wipe out almost all of a religion. Almost, because some of the faithful will persist anyway. As Stargate SG1 put it, "They have to be fanatics to be worshiping a dead god."
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This suggests to me that certain civilizations go on Crusades. Your fortress might be besieged by foreigners who don't like your religion.
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I think it would be fun if it's possible to donate/dedicate artifacts and masterwork goods to temples - either by the player, or, in the case of artifacts, by their creators, if they are devoted enough. The gifts should be appropriate for the particular god's topic (e.g. weapons and armor for a war god) and kept in an appropriate container in the temple.
God-pandering like in Impressions games (Caesar, Pharaoh, etc.) can be skipped at first or at all - temple gifts don't necessarily have to produce supernatural effects to be useful. Like in the real world, they also have mundane applications, such as producing happy thoughts in worshipers who visit the temple and increasing its prestige/influence. Urist McReligious can feel really warm and fuzzy inside about that masterwork gold helmet on the altar, or, alternatively, get upset when it's nicked by a cutebold or destroyed by a Forgotten Beast. (Do they actually destroy stuff?)
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I think it would be fun if it's possible to donate/dedicate artifacts and masterwork goods to temples - either by the player, or, in the case of artifacts, by their creators, if they are devoted enough. The gifts should be appropriate for the particular god's topic (e.g. weapons and armor for a war god) and kept in an appropriate container in the temple.
I like the idea of this. A special strange mood could even be created for people wanting to create something for their favorite diety. If there are ever going to be temple-related skills, this mood could instantly boast the stats in them to legendary+, together with the crafting skill used. Or maybe dwarfs who have completed this mood become prophets or high-priests.
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Based upon how things work in human religions I would propose that things work as follows.
Religious dwarves get unhappy if they do not have a temple in which to pray to one of the gods they believe in. A temple in order to work but have a priest and must meet particular requirements, say a particular material which can be randomly generated.
Once you set up a temple you must appoint a high priest. Once a high priest is appointed then a new religion is formed that will recruit people that worship their god and attend their temple. The high priest is given a possibly silly name like the existing high priests are as well (Supreme Baby comes to mind). Without appointing a priest however temples do not function and you cannot appoint a priest unless you have a high priest.
As you build more temples you appoint more priests to attend them. This is all managed on the nobles screen, priests are considered nobles and religious work is considered noble position work.
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Based upon how things work in human religions I would propose that things work as follows.
Religious dwarves get unhappy if they do not have a temple in which to pray to one of the gods they believe in. A temple in order to work but have a priest and must meet particular requirements, say a particular material which can be randomly generated.
Once you set up a temple you must appoint a high priest. Once a high priest is appointed then a new religion is formed that will recruit people that worship their god and attend their temple. The high priest is given a possibly silly name like the existing high priests are as well (Supreme Baby comes to mind). Without appointing a priest however temples do not function and you cannot appoint a priest unless you have a high priest.
As you build more temples you appoint more priests to attend them. This is all managed on the nobles screen, priests are considered nobles and religious work is considered noble position work.
I like the idea, but I think it would be better if High Priests appointed "normal" priests alone. This could lead to FUN, if the priests won't have good enough skills to preach your dwarves.
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There's more than one religion though, right? You'd need a way to appoint priests to (Osiris) or (Set) or (Ra) not just to your temples in general.
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Worship does not require a priest... Priests are simply professional worshippers. Just like a tavern can function without a Piano Man, the faithful at a site can fulfill most of all of their spiritual needs without a priest or temple, and could even do it in secret if necessary (witness any religious minority in a theocracy or religious monarchy).
A shrine would be a worship zone without an assigned priest, though someone might take on some kind of lay clergy caretaker role. Lack of a shrine causes stress, the shrine itself probably has no direct benefit other than people admiring its components.
When a priest is assigned to your site's Quiet Place to Contemplate the Man in the Sky, it becomes a "real" temple and might confer tangible benefits when and if certain thresholds are met (which vary by religion). The two that don't require any "magic" involve the catharsis (stress relief) of religious services, plus someone to share the defusing duties with your mayor.
One AI detail will be interesting: do the dwarves accept worship of a deity just because the player ordered construction of a shrine? Would a non-believer take the job to construct it? Would members of oppressed faiths be dumb enough to gather at it (setting aside the possibility of protest meetings to attempt to gain acceptance through a show of numbers and/or influential members)?
If we do get divine strange moods that turns their creators into priests, hopefully priests aren't a "lazy" type of noble.
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Worship does not require a priest... Priests are simply professional worshippers. Just like a tavern can function without a Piano Man, the faithful at a site can fulfill most of all of their spiritual needs without a priest or temple, and could even do it in secret if necessary (witness any religious minority in a theocracy or religious monarchy).
A shrine would be a worship zone without an assigned priest, though someone might take on some kind of lay clergy caretaker role. Lack of a shrine causes stress, the shrine itself probably has no direct benefit other than people admiring its components.
Dwarves should certainly pray on their own. However not having a shrine to their god with a priest to pray in makes them unhappy when they do so. I think that we should actually have temples separate to shrines and have religions mandate the creation of a specific temple, which is assigned as a shrine to the high priest. This distinction has a historical precedent but more importantly it makes the religion game playable, a shrine only requires say a statue and some furniture while a temple requires a certain value.
The temple on the other hand is only required once the religion reaches a certain number of members and has far more complex requirements as well as having to be of a certain value.
When a priest is assigned to your site's Quiet Place to Contemplate the Man in the Sky, it becomes a "real" temple and might confer tangible benefits when and if certain thresholds are met (which vary by religion). The two that don't require any "magic" involve the catharsis (stress relief) of religious services, plus someone to share the defusing duties with your mayor.
One AI detail will be interesting: do the dwarves accept worship of a deity just because the player ordered construction of a shrine? Would a non-believer take the job to construct it? Would members of oppressed faiths be dumb enough to gather at it (setting aside the possibility of protest meetings to attempt to gain acceptance through a show of numbers and/or influential members)?
If we do get divine strange moods that turns their creators into priests, hopefully priests aren't a "lazy" type of noble.
Priests are just ordinary nobles mechanically and what they do is handled like other noble jobs. Just like with all existing nobles, priests do normal jobs but also have special priest jobs that do not appear on the labours menu. Priest jobs are scheduled to trigger at a given day in a month, say on day 15 priest will go to his assigned shrine.
Once the priest is there other dwarves of his religion will gather to take part in religion, meeting their present religious needs. It works basically like a military training exercise in lots of ways for members of the religion. However dwarves that are not part of a religion will go there is a service in progress to any religion and they have religious needs, causing them to be converted to the religion.
Temples are created using the normal labours and nobody would have any objection to doing work to build a temple to a religion simply because he does not believe in it.
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Priests are just ordinary nobles mechanically and what they do is handled like other noble jobs. Just like with all existing nobles, priests do normal jobs but also have special priest jobs that do not appear on the labours menu.
Certain nobles (barons, dukes, etc.) aren't supposed to do normal labors, but I think it might be broken currently, as my elected monarch still takes his old farming duties seriously.
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Priests are just ordinary nobles mechanically and what they do is handled like other noble jobs. Just like with all existing nobles, priests do normal jobs but also have special priest jobs that do not appear on the labours menu.
Certain nobles (barons, dukes, etc.) aren't supposed to do normal labors, but I think it might be broken currently, as my elected monarch still takes his old farming duties seriously.
That's what I meant. The position flag is called LAZY, though I hadn't paid close enough attention to notice it was broken.
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Worship does not require a priest... Priests are simply professional worshippers. Just like a tavern can function without a Piano Man, the faithful at a site can fulfill most of all of their spiritual needs without a priest or temple, and could even do it in secret if necessary (witness any religious minority in a theocracy or religious monarchy).
This is a very Westernised and modern (in the bad sense) view of religious practice and devotion. I'm a Protestant, so I sympathise with the point of view, philosophically and theologically; but it's simply not accurate, historically or even as a matter of current affairs. Some religions have required and continue to require sacrifices to be offered to placate the gods, and they do not offer "Quiet Places to Contemplate the Man in the Sky". A temple full of animals being killed is hardly a quiet place! Nor, for that matter, a clean one. Toady can set whatever rules he likes for religion, of course, but I don't want discussions around religion to take the line that this Westernised "religion as quiet and sanitary philosophy" approach is definitive. It is quite possible to imagine a system of religious belief that does not permit private prayer.
In terms of behaviour and expectations of religions, it seems to me, at least, more likely that one factor (though only one) in how devotees of different sects operate differently would be their particular god's patronage. (Spheres of influence are meant to be coming, aren't they?) So suppose we can get a sect dedicated to the God of Social Order, to take a particularly obvious counter-example to your suggestion: it is not going to be remotely satisfied with loosey-goosey nonsense like, "We don't need a priest, we're all able to access the divine," and instead will simply not operate until it has a priest authorised and ordained by a duly constituted authority, whereupon devotional practices may be undertaken only under the supervision of a properly ordained priest. On the other hand, sure, a sect dedicated to the God of the Common Dwarf is highly likely to consider ordained priesthood to be sacrilegious, and might encourage its devotees to pray wherever they feel like.
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Since at some point - if I'm not mistakened - dwarves will have their own money and buy things, I'd like to see some dwarves build little altars in their own rooms. It could be just a statue of their god or a saint in a little table or be lavishly decorated.
You can look at them to see what they've come up with and eventually destroy them giving the dwarf an unhappy thought.
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That's what I meant. The position flag is called LAZY, though I hadn't paid close enough attention to notice it was broken.
The position tage is actually called MENIAL_WORK_EXEMPTION and it does nothing at all. You could simply remove it and nothing in the game would be changed. I think that Toady One have problems with the initial mechanics and then decided the idea was not such a good one anyway and so never bothered to fix it.
Another defunct tag is ACCOUNT_EXEMPT that is still in there even though it does nothing since the 'economy' was abolished (actually the economy was not abolished but rather the intial DF communism economy was made sustainable over time).
Both of these tags are fossils from older versions that have no meaning in the present version. There plenty of tags left over from older versions in the raws that have no present functionality.
Since at some point - if I'm not mistakened - dwarves will have their own money and buy things, I'd like to see some dwarves build little altars in their own rooms. It could be just a statue of their god or a saint in a little table or be lavishly decorated.
You can look at them to see what they've come up with and eventually destroy them giving the dwarf an unhappy thought.
I do not see why we will have to wait until they have money and can buy things. We can simply have them place an order an alter in their room, you order the construction of an alter for your stockpile and they fetch the alter. The number of alters in ordered would appear on the demands list. All reported personal demands could be listed in a window so we can simply order the manager to produce those items.
The main difficulty here is that alters will presumably be buildings. Dwarves will have to be able to build constructions autonomously of the player in their rooms. They will also have to track their dependance on the alters so that the player cannot simply demolish the alter, that is not much of a problem since we already do that with nobles demanding armour stands.
That is basically part of dynamic demand, instead of only nobles having demands, every dwarf has their own personal demands that develop over time and are listed in the same manner as noble demands are listed and the noble demands are simply added on top.
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"Quiet Place to Contemplate the Man in the Sky" was a reference to the movie The Invention of Lying, and not meant to imply that all DF religions ought to behave the same. Man-in-the-Sky forbid.
That said, making it intentionally difficult to cold-start a new site does not sound like fun for the player, so I would suggest ensuring that there was something that can mitigate we-don't-have-proper-services-here stress, and that it be communicated to the player. If that sounds too simplistic, remember that the player will be seeing requests from several faiths, and needs to pick. Imposing stress for they have a temple and we don't can add some complexity to scheduling. Even then, it should take a while before it becomes an issue so that the game is playable.
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"Quiet Place to Contemplate the Man in the Sky" was a reference to the movie The Invention of Lying, and not meant to imply that all DF religions ought to behave the same. Man-in-the-Sky forbid.
That said, making it intentionally difficult to cold-start a new site does not sound like fun for the player, so I would suggest ensuring that there was something that can mitigate we-don't-have-proper-services-here stress, and that it be communicated to the player. If that sounds too simplistic, remember that the player will be seeing requests from several faiths, and needs to pick. Imposing stress for they have a temple and we don't can add some complexity to scheduling. Even then, it should take a while before it becomes an issue so that the game is playable.
Ah, so pop culture references I generally miss. :)
I see what you mean about the cold-start issue. My guess is that one part of that, thinking further along that line, is that devotees of a sect requiring a priest (let's run with the God of Social Order) are highly unlikely to go anywhere long-term unless they can access the services of a priest ordained subject to due process. So the game logic is simply that for dwarves with Social-Orderist beliefs, laity will only arrive when there is a practising priest, but priests will arrive at any time. Hey presto, automatic narrative: your first Social-Orderist will be a missionary priest! :)
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The shrine of the fertility deity is going to be an interesting place. Almost don't want to see it get a priest and get all orderly.
Though the religious make-up of the fort ought to influence who wants to migrate there, formal progress triggers for each randomly generated religion would probably be overwhelming for the player.
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I do not see why we will have to wait until they have money and can buy things. We can simply have them place an order an alter in their room, you order the construction of an alter for your stockpile and they fetch the alter. The number of alters in ordered would appear on the demands list. All reported personal demands could be listed in a window so we can simply order the manager to produce those items.
The main difficulty here is that alters will presumably be buildings. Dwarves will have to be able to build constructions autonomously of the player in their rooms. They will also have to track their dependance on the alters so that the player cannot simply demolish the alter, that is not much of a problem since we already do that with nobles demanding armour stands.
This is why I mentioned dwarves buying things. Will they just buy stuff they can keep in a chest or will they get lamps, statues and things they can place around their personal space? Because I would love it if dwarves customized their own things. Similarly, they'd build their own little altar if religious.
Requests such as these - similar to mandates - for all dwarves would be a gigantic headache. It'd be better to let dwarves do what they want inside their own bedroom.
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I'd like to see it go a little deeper than that, like a cultist dwarf decides to live in a tiny out of the way hovel, so he can dig a secret tunnel in the floor to a hidden altar. It seems like stuff like this would be very hard to do in your own fortresses (dwarves autonomously deciding to dig in their home), but it could be done through worldgen.
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This is why I mentioned dwarves buying things. Will they just buy stuff they can keep in a chest or will they get lamps, statues and things they can place around their personal space? Because I would love it if dwarves customized their own things. Similarly, they'd build their own little altar if religious.
Requests such as these - similar to mandates - for all dwarves would be a gigantic headache. It'd be better to let dwarves do what they want inside their own bedroom.
We will still have to arrange those things to be made, whether dwarves 'buy' them or not, so there is nothing special about their bedrooms unless they can conjure the alters out of thin air. It would not be a headache because the game would keep track of the entire demands of all your dwarves, including the noble mandates and requirements on one screen. We can see what the dwarves demand at a glance and plan as to how to meet those demands.
We could therefore see at a glance that we need to produce 10 alters for our dwarves. The dwarves can then pick the alter they like the most and build them inside their rooms at a random location. The same system can be used for armour stands, weapon racks, cages and all manner of other buildable items. Non-buildable items are either dumped on the floor next to the bed or they are placed inside a container.
We are bundling all demands into a single screen. It gets better in that this would actually allows us to automate production, instead of us manually assigning jobs an AI automatically orders the manager to produce the needed items. Once we have that we have done 50% of the work for creating completely AI controlled fortresses.
"Quiet Place to Contemplate the Man in the Sky" was a reference to the movie The Invention of Lying, and not meant to imply that all DF religions ought to behave the same. Man-in-the-Sky forbid.
That said, making it intentionally difficult to cold-start a new site does not sound like fun for the player, so I would suggest ensuring that there was something that can mitigate we-don't-have-proper-services-here stress, and that it be communicated to the player. If that sounds too simplistic, remember that the player will be seeing requests from several faiths, and needs to pick. Imposing stress for they have a temple and we don't can add some complexity to scheduling. Even then, it should take a while before it becomes an issue so that the game is playable.
I think that the initial costs required to build a shrine should not be high. Basically all you would need is a wood or stone statue of a particular god and a sufficiant number of chairs. All these could simply be ordered from the carpenter's or mason's workshop right from the start.
It is when the religions get to a certain size (and thus your population is also of a certain size) that things get expensive. Religions of a certain size demand a temple, which unlike the shrine has a far higher required value and a load of other proceedurely generated requirements unique to that particular deity. As they get bigger they want grander and grander temples to be built and shrines eventually start to need upgrading so they are equal to low-level temples too.
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Just to point out:
Alter = "to change"
Altar = "holy table or bench"
A temple can be a room designated around a statue of a specific deity. Dwarves who worship that deity can then gather there to "worship". I see priests as nobles, with increases in status brought by requirements for devotion to a deity as well as the number of dwarves who regularly worship at a given temple. These levels and numbers are easily tracked by current systems.
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For personal altars and other personal belongings, I'd prefer it if the dwarves bought or somehow obtained the stuff themselves and placed it in their personal place. An altar isn't necessarily something you build. A table with candles, a figurine of a saint, photographs and adornments can be an altar, for example. Or even just a cloth on the floor with stuff on it.
Why not have dwarves be able to furnish their own rooms however they like? They get paid for their work or they can make stuff at the workshops in their free time if the workshop is free. And they'd make demands of the nobles - same as noble mandates - only for things they can't make or buy themselves.
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For personal altars and other personal belongings, I'd prefer it if the dwarves bought or somehow obtained the stuff themselves and placed it in their personal place. An altar isn't necessarily something you build. A table with candles, a figurine of a saint, photographs and adornments can be an altar, for example. Or even just a cloth on the floor with stuff on it.
Why not have dwarves be able to furnish their own rooms however they like? They get paid for their work or they can make stuff at the workshops in their free time if the workshop is free. And they'd make demands of the nobles - same as noble mandates - only for things they can't make or buy themselves.
Because the two systems will clash, resulting in an enormous Tragedy of the Commons among other problems. If all dwarves simply go and make their own stuff then given that the raw materials are finite then all dwarves will simply exhaust the available common resources in order to produce private items.
We will have a conflict between player use of resources for rational goals and dwarf accumulation of various items to meet their own personal goals that serve no overarching purpose. As result we will find ourselves suffering critical and unpredictable shortages of materials needed potentially in a critical capacity.
Think of the mayhem created in our plans by one dwarf with a strange mood. What you propose is basically that we have 100+ dwarves perpetually going into strange moods, imagine how tedious it would be to have to go through each and every dwarf to see what resources they are each going to need for their own personal production.
It is far simpler to simply bundle all demands, including for strange moods and mandates into a single screen. If we then introduce personal production then the materials and workshops needed for such dwarves personal projects can be listed on the screen. If a dwarf wants to make something himself, then he will list a demand for the needed components and it will appear alongside all other demands.
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That's quite the straw man argument.
How did you take what I said to mean that dwarves have ready access to all materials they want? If they want to build their own table or chair, they still need to buy the materials for it.
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That's quite the straw man argument.
How did you take what I said to mean that dwarves have ready access to all materials they want? If they want to build their own table or chair, they still need to buy the materials for it.
Using what? We the player are selling the materials to the dwarves but we are also paying the very same dwarves to buy those materials of us.
It is pointless because our prices are set simply being set in order to ration things. What I am trying to make sure is that no dwarf helps themselves to more than 1 bar of charcoal for personal production so I will still have enough charcoal for weapons to defend my fort. I have to set the price of a bar of charcoal to be half the wages of one dwarf when I could simply cut out the middle man and simply state that a dwarf is only allowed 1 bar of charcoal per month for personal use.
It is best in a project to avoid adding in redundant mechanics that cause problems, simply because you can add more mechanics to solve those problem. Your idea of dwarves personally engaging in unregulated production fundamentally clashes with the way the game economy works at core. That is because both systems compete for the same pool of labour and materials, the first thing any sane player if your ideas were implemented would be to set the price of everything ridiculously high so that nobody can never afford to do any unregulated production.
If I have 15 dwarves I need 15 beds. If I run things as at present I make the most efficiant use of scarce wood resources, there will only be 15 beds made and that is it. If we have dwarves making their own beds then I still make 15 beds and say 5 dwarves make beds on their own, meaning I just wasted 5 units of wood that could have been more productively used to make say barrels to store food.
It gets worse when you consider that all 5 dwarves are simultaneously working to create their own beds and thus will take up 5 workshops (and I do not know the number beforehand which makes it worse). They are not master carpenters, so their work is shoddy and slow compared to the master carpenter that I would at the moment employ to make all 15 beds quickly using one workshop. The dwarves that are working to create their own beds at dabbling level are better employed doing things that they are actually trained for. This problem is the case *regardless* of whether those 5 dwarves have to buy the wood they use or can just grab it from the stockpile.
What did your autonomous production mechanics even add to the game as it presently stands? Dwarves can already choose which items they want to use and they can already freely produce any item that is in demand at a workshop provided they are not prohibited from doing that labour.
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It's like this. You have the fortress's supplies. Dwarves can go and buy whatever they want from traders with their own money. Nobody can buy your fort stuff unless you say that it's specifically for sale.
Either way, even if letting dwarves make their own stuff is too complicated, that has nothing to do with them decorating their personal space however they want.
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It's like this. You have the fortress's supplies. Dwarves can go and buy whatever they want from traders with their own money. Nobody can buy your fort stuff unless you say that it's specifically for sale.
Either way, even if letting dwarves make their own stuff is too complicated, that has nothing to do with them decorating their personal space however they want.
I am not sure this is the right thread for this discussion but here goes.
How did these dwarves get their own money? What economic purpose does money serve anyway in DF?
The answer to the first question is clearly that the player pays the dwarves in something that they then own. That brings us to the second question, why would anyone choose to initially pay their dwarves anything at all when these mechanics *have* no function and are solely destructive.
The Status Quo works essentially perfectly, hence any sane player would upon the institution of your system simply set everything to be for sale for 0 and give everyone 0 wages. It is a lot of wasted work on Toady One's part to add a redundant feuture in response to which the online tutorials will immediately tell the player to make things work exactly as they do now as much as possible.
Dwarves being able to buy from traders with their own money does have some merit as an idea but it still introduces the clashing economics system. Stockpiled money could certainly be picked up by individual dwarves and used to buy items of personal demand from visiting traders and that gives the fortress a reason to mint money, money works well because it is useless thus dwarves will not be trading away useful items. Problem is what happens when a individual dwarf buys something that the fortress also wants to buy, possibly at the exact same moment. To avoid this we should probably only open the caravan to the public right before it departs; thus the clashing systems are kept apart.
Dwarves decorating or customising their own stuff is certainly not a problem but there is simply no need to introduce buying and selling for the system to work. Dwarves can just pick stuff up from the stockpile to decorate their rooms and this can be handled by the same system of supply&demand everything else does. Individual production is more of a challenge though, it consumes workshops and raw materials and thus clashes with collective production over the same capital.
We certainly cannot implement this until we have a system of rationing in place by which we can make it so personal consumption of certain items is restricted to a certain quantity. That way you can keep the two economies seperate by restricting private production when it competes with collective production, so if we are making beds we could simply set everyone's wood allowance to 0 to shut down private bed production or production of any wooden goods for that matter.
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Even if you could keep track of every little item in the fort just using your own head, a good pricing system would still be helpful (http://bev.berkeley.edu/ipe/readings/The%20use%20of%20knowledge%20in%20society.pdf). And for those of us who at least use the stock screen, it improves efficiency.
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Even if you could keep track of every little item in the fort just using your own head, a good pricing system would still be helpful (http://bev.berkeley.edu/ipe/readings/The%20use%20of%20knowledge%20in%20society.pdf). And for those of us who at least use the stock screen, it improves efficiency.
Whatever is the case in the real world Dwarf Fortress mechanically has no functional need for pricing at the fortress level and if introduced skilled players would likely only use it in so far as they are literally forced to do so by the game. Quoting extremist Libertarian philosophers will do nothing to change the redundancy of pricing mechanics in Dwarf Fortress at the Fortress level.
We would be paying the dwarves in order to buy from us in order simply to ration scarce goods. At the moment even rationing is generally redundant since resources far exceed the dwarves actual demands. Only if personal demands were to be increased however as I advocate then rationing or prices could actually have a function however.
What the player is actually trying to make sure is that nobody gets more than a certain amount of a good. In order to determine these things using a pricing mechanic the player will first determine how much of a good there is, how much they can afford to lose and then how much currency the average dwarf has available.
Rationing things directly is far superior because that way we simply have to determine the first two values, without the need to trawl through the personal possessions of dozens of dwarves and then having to do complex maths in order to figure out just how much of a given good your dwarves will be able to acquire at a given price. All pricing is doing here is rationing goods in a less efficient manner than just rationing them would.
Anyway this thread gets more and more off topic.
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You keep assuming the player sets the prices manually. You can't adjust prices on the trading screen now, and prices were fixed when the economy was activated, so I'm not where you got this idea. To be useful, the game would need to adjust prices automatically in response to supply and demand. The player may think he or she wants control over this, but I n a game with so many combinations of material, form and quality it would be a full-time job.
All of that aside, DF citizens do own certain things that they arrive with, or took from the fort stocks to fulfil a need. The prototype her is grabbing a new pair of socks when the old one wears out. The game issue is whether spiritual needs rise to the level of socks.
I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place. THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.
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I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place. THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.
Exactly, which is why I said "at some point dwarves will have their own money and buy things".
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I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place. THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.
Exactly, which is why I said "at some point dwarves will have their own money and buy things".
To further this, I do believe Toady has said the economy will be coming back into the game once he can make it not-broken. The timeframe for that, though, is... long-term, in all likelihood.
GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be. Please cool off a little bit.
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You keep assuming the player sets the prices manually. You can't adjust prices on the trading screen now, and prices were fixed when the economy was activated, so I'm not where you got this idea. To be useful, the game would need to adjust prices automatically in response to supply and demand. The player may think he or she wants control over this, but I n a game with so many combinations of material, form and quality it would be a full-time job.
So basically what you are saying is that we force the player to play along with something that no player that is not specifically looking for a challenge would actually either implement or tolerate to exist.
There is no way the AI can set the prices correctly because the AI is just not smart enough to understand all the variables and it does not have the knowledge of the future plans of the player. What will happen if these ideas are implemented is that we the player will simply create a massive reserve of everything in order to drive the prices down to near zero so that all our dwarves will have everything they want.
I do not want to have to stockpile a mountain of surplus items just so so that my dwarves can afford to buy the items that are available. If we try and fix prices by supply and demand all that happens is we start to plan things but counting 100 as 0, because the algorithm is afterall based upon supply and demand.
At the moment the game is intuitive, you have this number of dwarves and you have this much stuff. What you propose does not change the situation, it merely adds a whole new layer of complexity since now we must all learn exactly how the pricing mechanism works in order to avoid our last dwarf starving to death amidst a mountain of food he cannot afford. If we succeed in figuring out the mechanism then we will simply work out how to break the system so that things will basically work as they do now.
Yes we break the system to make sure that everything is so cheap that everyone can buy anything that they demand until our stocks are empty. At which point the question arises: why did we bother to add a system of pricing when the ideal state of the player is to have everything essentially free anyway?
All of that aside, DF citizens do own certain things that they arrive with, or took from the fort stocks to fulfil a need. The prototype her is grabbing a new pair of socks when the old one wears out. The game issue is whether spiritual needs rise to the level of socks.
I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place. THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.
As I told Deboche before right before this thread derailed, dwarves setting up little figurines in their room does not require that we implement a whole economic matrix of supply, demand, prices and private property. It is quite trivial to add as things are because as you have strangely pointed out with socks the game already does the equivilant already.
I do not understand where either of you concluded that dwarves had to buy their figurines in order to set them up in their rooms. Implementing that feuture is trivial, implemented an entire internal fortress economy with prices set by the game that actually both works and does something useful is *not* trivial.
To further this, I do believe Toady has said the economy will be coming back into the game once he can make it not-broken. The timeframe for that, though, is... long-term, in all likelihood.
GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be. Please cool off a little bit.
I am no more argumentative than a large number other people. It is just that Deboche and Dirst's ideas in their present form would ruin the game to a degree that would make the original economy seem like a golden age of functionality.
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GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be. Please cool off a little bit.
I am no more argumentative than a large number other people. It is just that Deboche and Dirst's ideas in their present form would ruin the game to a degree that would make the original economy seem like a golden age of functionality.
You have strangely specific ideas of how the game is supposed to operate. This is not a D&D game you're running for your friends where you get to make pronouncements about how reality works. It's Toady's game, and he has put reintroducing an economy on the development roadmap. Yes, you will need to worry about your dwarves being able to afford their meals. When that happens, there will probably be an analog of forbidding that reserves items (or entire stockpiles) for official fortress use.
The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions. Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are? Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it? Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?
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The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions. Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are? Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it? Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?
This is an interesting implication. I may be completely wrong here but I think Toady mentioned something about factions within a fortress. It'd be nice to have the option of free religion or to have a repressive religion tied with the law. Or maybe it could be up to the noble in charge. Do you get a Bloody Mary or a Ghandi?
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Do you get a Bloody Mary or a Ghandi?
(http://i2.wp.com/caffeine-fueled.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/civilization-nukes.jpg)
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For funerals I'd feel sorry for the dwarven pallbearer. The poor guy would have to just heft a rock casket with a corpse in it onto his shoulders and haul it all the way to the memorial hall. Granted the haulsmiths basically do that already. It's still a funny picture I have in my head.
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The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions. Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are? Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it? Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?
This is an interesting implication. I may be completely wrong here but I think Toady mentioned something about factions within a fortress. It'd be nice to have the option of free religion or to have a repressive religion tied with the law. Or maybe it could be up to the noble in charge. Do you get a Bloody Mary or a Ghandi?
There's always the old, "Build each faction their own part of the fortress and keep them as separate as possible" strategy. I'm interested to see how that would work with procedurally generated religious conflicts, too - some worlds may have just one religion relatively ostracised from the rest, others may have different sides drawn up.
It'd be a good excuse to build an automated minecart system, if (say) the least-liked group are in charge of farming.
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You have strangely specific ideas of how the game is supposed to operate. This is not a D&D game you're running for your friends where you get to make pronouncements about how reality works. It's Toady's game, and he has put reintroducing an economy on the development roadmap. Yes, you will need to worry about your dwarves being able to afford their meals. When that happens, there will probably be an analog of forbidding that reserves items (or entire stockpiles) for official fortress use.
Toady One would be foolish if he reintroduced the 'economy' so it worked essentially the way it did last time. Dwarves starving to death because they cannot afford food *is* part of what made the 'economy' broken. There is reason that the old economy was scrapped rather than simply fixed and that is because the fundamental concept as to how it worked was broken.
I do not know of any sources where Toady One promises to reintroduce the 'economy' in the old sense of a meta-feature plonked on top of the existing economy when the correct conditions are met. I believe that is just a rumour spread by fans of the old economy concept like yourself. What is the case however is that Toady One has plans to expand the existing economy by adding things like caravans travelling across the map and trading with travellers; both of these however are building on the existing system not reintroducing anything, caravans and fortresses trading with adventurers is already in the game.
That is way things are going, strangely specific ideas related to developing the existing economy brick by brick are how things are being done and not vague megaplans to reorganise Dwarf Fortress so it works in a way that von-Hayek can relate to.
The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions. Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are? Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it? Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?
This all rather works on the assumption that there would be heretics. Why would the player invent heretics in the first place, what purpose would that serve?
Historically heretics were normally defined by the government for political reasons, that is it was a way to surpress unorthodox political ideologies while effectively demonising them at the same time. Until we have an opposition that has opposing ideologies to the player's, the player would only play along with heresy hunting if they were literally forced to do so by the game.
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PTW!
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... Oh my god, GoblinCookie. Just, you're aware that DF is a simulation, right? Not everything has to have 100% game-value and be completely controlled by the player. It's not like we get to pick what kind of immigrants we get or which family lines eventually join the world-gen nobility, having story-elements that can only happen naturally makes the the world seem more alive and makes for a better simulation. You think there's going to be strategic value to the kinds of poetry dwarves will prefer in the next release? I don't. It'll be fun and neat to go through the histories of various poets and musicians, but I can't see how anything the Dev-blog is currently talking about could possibly be interpreted as strictly game-logic.
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I do not know of any sources where Toady One promises to reintroduce the 'economy' in the old sense of a meta-feature plonked on top of the existing economy when the correct conditions are met. I believe that is just a rumour spread by fans of the old economy concept like yourself. What is the case however is that Toady One has plans to expand the existing economy by adding things like caravans travelling across the map and trading with travellers; both of these however are building on the existing system not reintroducing anything, caravans and fortresses trading with adventurers is already in the game.
That is way things are going, strangely specific ideas related to developing the existing economy brick by brick are how things are being done and not vague megaplans to reorganise Dwarf Fortress so it works in a way that von-Hayek can relate to.
The dev page mentions prices derived from supply and demand, and imperfect knowledge of prices elsewhere in the world. Sounds pretty Hayek-y.
It doesn't mention player-set prices.
This all rather works on the assumption that there would be heretics. Why would the player invent heretics in the first place, what purpose would that serve?
Historically heretics were normally defined by the government for political reasons, that is it was a way to surpress unorthodox political ideologies while effectively demonising them at the same time. Until we have an opposition that has opposing ideologies to the player's, the player would only play along with heresy hunting if they were literally forced to do so by the game.
The player doesn't invent heretics, any more than the player invents grudges. If you play a civ that has a religion that doesn't play nicely with the dominant one(s), then you're going to have religious outcasts, heretics, heathens, cultists, pagans, or whatever you want to call them. The dominant religion's attitude toward the disfavored religion would affect the seriousness of the "offense." Mere misguided souls (heathens, pagans, and cult members) are treated harshly, while those actively against the dominant faith (heretics and cult leaders) have historically been singled out for especially barbaric treatment. Of course, some religions are so commando that they peg the punishment for every non-believer at the high end.
My guess is that the game would unrealistically max out heresy punishments at EXILE so that "nice" civs (without TORTURE_AS_EXAMPLE) won't go around burning witches at the stake.
In any case, the UI question is whether the player knows about any heretics (etc.) in the fort. I think not knowing would be a nice change of pace from the typical vampire hunt. In a distant-future version of the game, you might find a mined-out area with a secret temple in it, but how in the world do the dwarves use it without revealing those tiles to the player?
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By the way, temples can perform some redistribution to take the edge off of the economy. Richer dwarves are expected to tithe more, and with those donations the temple can feed/clothe/etc the poor. It could be a direct redistribution of coins, but I have higher hopes than that.
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By the way, temples can perform some redistribution to take the edge off of the economy. Richer dwarves are expected to tithe more, and with those donations the temple can feed/clothe/etc the poor. It could be a direct redistribution of coins, but I have higher hopes than that.
I like this idea, depending on the god in question. A god of greed, for instance, might expect their worshippers to either pay high tithes to the priests (which the priests then keep) or not pay tithes at all and keep it all for themselves. It will be interesting to see what Toady eventually decides on in terms of temples.
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... Oh my god, GoblinCookie. Just, you're aware that DF is a simulation, right? Not everything has to have 100% game-value and be completely controlled by the player. It's not like we get to pick what kind of immigrants we get or which family lines eventually join the world-gen nobility, having story-elements that can only happen naturally makes the the world seem more alive and makes for a better simulation. You think there's going to be strategic value to the kinds of poetry dwarves will prefer in the next release? I don't. It'll be fun and neat to go through the histories of various poets and musicians, but I can't see how anything the Dev-blog is currently talking about could possibly be interpreted as strictly game-logic.
Indeed, however it is not fun when the player is forced to implement certain economic policies by some kind of heavy-handed game mechanics equivilant of IMF. Yet it is not clear why certain of Dirst and Deboche's economic policies (such as internal prices for food, rooms or drink) would ever be implemented by the player otherwise.
The old system as I understand it was just that, the fortress functions happily using the present economic system until it gets to a certain wealth and then the IMF-code turns up whether you like it or not, activating something nasty called the economy. ;D
The dev page mentions prices derived from supply and demand, and imperfect knowledge of prices elsewhere in the world. Sounds pretty Hayek-y.
It doesn't mention player-set prices.
What you are referring to is this.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
World economy
Supply/demand based on current available entity resources etc.
Expand on trade/tribute relationships formed in world generation
Realize trade/tribute relationships with actual caravans moving on the map
Ability to get some supply/demand information about nearby locations from travelers and others
Ability to get that information yourself and trade it to merchants, especially as explorer
Replace dwarf mode generated caravans with actual caravans
Improved dwarf mode trade agreements incorporating all the world gen/supply/demand/merchant info etc.
Fairs
The emphasis here is on the world economy. There is nothing here about developing the internal site economy only the economy at the level of sites and caravans (what already exists). The only possible exception to this is the last entry, that is fairs.
I understand to mean however that fairs as an extension of caravans, basically they are travelling fairs which set up outside or inside your settlements and from which individual dwarves will buy particular items they want (using an allowance given to them by the player?). What is hopeful simply from addition of fairs as a seperate thing from caravans is that Toady One seems to understand what I pointed out earlier, that the player's purchasing things will end up clashing with individual dwarves purchasing things.
von-Hayak's basic idea is that prices transmit accurate information as to the situation of things in the economy that allow individuals to plan their economic activities accordingly. The intended political consequence of this is that governments should never fix or attempt to interfere with prices because the freedom to set prices is now essential to the proper functioning of supply and demand.
There is little correspondance between what he was saying and the way that Dwarf Fortress is planned/does handle trade. Prices are not being taken by traders to reflect the actual supply and demand but instead it is all a game of poker where the vital skill is the ability to decieve people as to the actual value of items and to avoid being decieved yourself (Appraise).
These two entries are actually very un-Hayakian.
Ability to get some supply/demand information about nearby locations from travelers and others
Ability to get that information yourself and trade it to merchants, especially as explorer
Hayakian merchants trade primarily based upon the prices which accurately reflect the situation as regards supply and demand. A Hayakian merchant would not buy information about supply and demand but information about the prices of goods. By having the merchants instead seek to know independantly what is in great supply and what is in demand essentially so that they cannot be decieved by the prices set by other merchants the game is rather saying the opposite to von-Hayak.
The player doesn't invent heretics, any more than the player invents grudges. If you play a civ that has a religion that doesn't play nicely with the dominant one(s), then you're going to have religious outcasts, heretics, heathens, cultists, pagans, or whatever you want to call them. The dominant religion's attitude toward the disfavored religion would affect the seriousness of the "offense." Mere misguided souls (heathens, pagans, and cult members) are treated harshly, while those actively against the dominant faith (heretics and cult leaders) have historically been singled out for especially barbaric treatment. Of course, some religions are so commando that they peg the punishment for every non-believer at the high end.
My guess is that the game would unrealistically max out heresy punishments at EXILE so that "nice" civs (without TORTURE_AS_EXAMPLE) won't go around burning witches at the stake.
In any case, the UI question is whether the player knows about any heretics (etc.) in the fort. I think not knowing would be a nice change of pace from the typical vampire hunt. In a distant-future version of the game, you might find a mined-out area with a secret temple in it, but how in the world do the dwarves use it without revealing those tiles to the player?
That was not the core issue, I had sorta guessed you would answer that way but I was making sure of it.
Granted there are proceedurely generated heretics why would the player care to actually engage in heresy hunting. Unlike vampires heretics are actually quite harmless; yes agreeing with the dominant religion as to what *is* a heretic and formerly commiting yourself to eradicate heresy may be a good idea to keep said folks happy but that is the end of it.
You see heresy hunting, unlike heretics themselves is rather harmful. You are standing to lose good, skilled dwarves who would be quite harmless. The ideal stategy then is to formally make heresy a 'crime' but see to it that as much as possible no heretics are actually ever caught.
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GoblinCookie: Stop thinking of things as a game, where every mechanic must make things better for the player. The vampire mechanic does nothing but screw over your fortress, to the point that the people who write utilities find ways to make it easier to find them. The ghosts rising does nothing useful for you (barring silly bugs that will be squished in the future). They're just there to make the game more interesting and enhance the simulation. Yes, it still needs to be playable, but none of the suggestions you rage against so vehemently would actually ruin the game. Maybe they'd bug you, but nothing here would faze me. You also constantly compare what people suggest to older, broken mechanics without actually taking into account the fact that Toady can write a better way of doing things in that regard.
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Yet it is not clear why certain of Dirst and Deboche's economic policies (such as internal prices for food, rooms or drink) would ever be implemented by the player otherwise.
The player doesn't implement food prices any more than the player implements haunting ghosts or wound infections or vermin. They're elements of the setting. If you don't like a new feature (and it's not adjustable to your liking), just don't upgrade your free copy of the game.
The old system as I understand it was just that, the fortress functions happily using the present economic system until it gets to a certain wealth and then the IMF-code turns up whether you like it or not, activating something nasty called the economy. ;D
Transitioning from an outpost-like commonwealth to a city-like market without a discrete state change would be quite a feat, but it's essential for an on-site economy to function properly. It's out of scope for this suggestion thread on temples, except to note that temples can smooth the transition by looking out for the undercapitalized.
The emphasis here is on the world economy. There is nothing here about developing the internal site economy only the economy at the level of sites and caravans (what already exists). The only possible exception to this is the last entry, that is fairs.
I understand to mean however that fairs as an extension of caravans, basically they are travelling fairs which set up outside or inside your settlements and from which individual dwarves will buy particular items they want (using an allowance given to them by the player?). What is hopeful simply from addition of fairs as a seperate thing from caravans is that Toady One seems to understand what I pointed out earlier, that the player's purchasing things will end up clashing with individual dwarves purchasing things.
We'll have a better idea how this is intended to work when the taverns appear in a release.
It reminds me of an entertaining discussion the writers had back in the days of Deep Space 9. Some were insisting that the Star Trek universe was post-capitalist and there was no money. "Well then," went the counterargument, "what are all of those people doing in the casino?"
von-Hayak's basic idea is that prices transmit accurate information as to the situation of things in the economy that allow individuals to plan their economic activities accordingly. The intended political consequence of this is that governments should never fix or attempt to interfere with prices because the freedom to set prices is now essential to the proper functioning of supply and demand.
That is not in the paper I linked, though it does sum up the ultimate logical conclusion of "freshwater economics" which includes the "Chicago School." This particular paper was written at approximately the same time that economics-of-information was emerging as a field, and since that time we've come to understand a lot more about when and if someone would truthfully reveal their private information. Short answer: only when it's in their own interest to do so, and in those cases it's usually costly to signal the information in a credible way (for example, offering unconditional warranties to signal your product quality).
The basic premise of the Hayek paper I actually linked is what might be called an economic version of the Gaia Hypothesis, that changes in supply and demand can influence production decisions through prices (and stock-outs). Temples may have some role to play in smoothing out economic shocks (by accepting donations during gluts and giving things away during shortages), but it's tangential to their primary purpose in a fort.
There is little correspondance between what he was saying and the way that Dwarf Fortress is planned/does handle trade. Prices are not being taken by traders to reflect the actual supply and demand but instead it is all a game of poker where the vital skill is the ability to decieve people as to the actual value of items and to avoid being decieved yourself (Appraise).
These two entries are actually very un-Hayakian.
That's because the supply and demand considerations aren't in the game yet. And since trading skills will continue to affect prices, we won't have a happy utopian Coase Theorem world where everything is fair. Mostly because bringing fairness into DF would be unseemly :)
Hayakian merchants trade primarily based upon the prices which accurately reflect the situation as regards supply and demand. A Hayakian merchant would not buy information about supply and demand but information about the prices of goods. By having the merchants instead seek to know independantly what is in great supply and what is in demand essentially so that they cannot be decieved by the prices set by other merchants the game is rather saying the opposite to von-Hayak.
Not sure where you get the idea that no one would ever buy information, and even if you somehow thought that was implied, trading for information is specifically on the dev page.
That was not the core issue, I had sorta guessed you would answer that way but I was making sure of it.
Granted there are proceedurely generated heretics why would the player care to actually engage in heresy hunting. Unlike vampires heretics are actually quite harmless; yes agreeing with the dominant religion as to what *is* a heretic and formerly commiting yourself to eradicate heresy may be a good idea to keep said folks happy but that is the end of it.
You see heresy hunting, unlike heretics themselves is rather harmful. You are standing to lose good, skilled dwarves who would be quite harmless. The ideal stategy then is to formally make heresy a 'crime' but see to it that as much as possible no heretics are actually ever caught.
Again, there are plenty of details outside the player's control that affect gameplay (at least for people paying attention) like grudges and assaults. Depending on the civ's relationship between church and state, the discovery of heretical religious materials might plop a crime into the justice system. Having the unsolved crime linger could cause stress.
The player could certainly hunt down the heretic, but it'd be fun to have some other alternatives. Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, does having the player order a shrine suddenly make that religion okay? Probably not. Would putting a heretic (known to the player but not the other citizens) in a position of authority soften views toward that religion "subliminally?" That would be interesting, especially given the risk of the heretic being unmasked before he/she has won acceptance for the religion... putting the faith in an even worse position than it was before.
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Let's not be too harsh on GoblinCookie. It helps to strengthen the suggestions when there's active resistance against them. Although I'm pretty sure Toady only reads the first post and skims the rest.
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GoblinCookie: Stop thinking of things as a game, where every mechanic must make things better for the player. The vampire mechanic does nothing but screw over your fortress, to the point that the people who write utilities find ways to make it easier to find them. The ghosts rising does nothing useful for you (barring silly bugs that will be squished in the future). They're just there to make the game more interesting and enhance the simulation. Yes, it still needs to be playable, but none of the suggestions you rage against so vehemently would actually ruin the game. Maybe they'd bug you, but nothing here would faze me. You also constantly compare what people suggest to older, broken mechanics without actually taking into account the fact that Toady can write a better way of doing things in that regard.
You do not seem to see the difference. Vampires can be killed, ghosts can be buried but if the game forces you to implement certain economic policies that actually do not make any sense in your own situation what then?
If the game has set your food prices too high for your favourite dwarf to eat then there is no solution in the game unless we can set the prices ourselves, which of course tends to be what lots of governments do or give away food for free which again is what lots of governments do.
If we can do those things then why would we ever play along with the system in the first place? Everyone will simply set the food price to 0 or give away all the food their fortress produces for free as a permanent policy. Is it really worth going to the bother to implement a vast and elaborate system of internal prices when the first page of the tutorial will simply tell each new player to set all prices to 0?
The player doesn't implement food prices any more than the player implements haunting ghosts or wound infections or vermin. They're elements of the setting. If you don't like a new feature (and it's not adjustable to your liking), just don't upgrade your free copy of the game.
Rember that at the moment internal food prices are simply not part of the setting unlike ghosts, wound infections and vermin. They are not even in the development plan so your confidence about the idea seems misplaced.
Transitioning from an outpost-like commonwealth to a city-like market without a discrete state change would be quite a feat, but it's essential for an on-site economy to function properly. It's out of scope for this suggestion thread on temples, except to note that temples can smooth the transition by looking out for the undercapitalized.
At the moment there is no logical need for any transition and everything works quite fine; it would continue to work just fine forever, as everyone happily works for free and helps themselves to what they need. I do not think the temples would do much smoothing of anything since they have to buy loads of other stuff that is more expensive probably than food, leaving themwith no money left over to tend to the poor.
We have to introduce flaws into the existing system and have the flaws become more serious as our settlement grows. The flaws are obviously related to first problem, everyone works for free. There is nothing essentially unrealistic about people working for free, people do volunteer to do lots of things, but they need to be motivated. I can think of a number of demotivaters that we can add to make our dwarves progressively less intrinsicly motivated as our fortress gets more advanced.
1. "Somebody else can do it": As the population grows the number of other dwarves that are equal or better to you at a given task increases and so does your motivation to work decrease.
2. "The fortress really does not need a thousandth plump helmet": As the number of a given item in stock compared to the population increases the task is seen as less and less vital, so dwarves motivation to do that task increases.
3. "I am so bored of hauling plump helmets": The more times a given dwarf does something in particular the less motivated they are to do it again. This is reset only by doing other tasks, particularly ones of a different category to the task they are used to doing.
The key thing is that the transition is both voluntery and gradual, the player decides to put certain items up for sale at a price and also decides what their dwarves will be paid for particular kinds of labours. Dwarves are programmed to be savvy enough to realise that money is worthless if nothing is for sale, they are only motivated to work by being paid if there is something they want to have up for sale.
The clever thing is this; the dwarves get paid for performing a particular labour however they get paid regardless of whether they actually have any plans for the money and are actually being motivated by it. Lowering their wages upsets them, meaning that the player starts to need to sell things in order to get the money and therefore can now end up going bust. However the player can subsidise things or give things away for free, provided that other areas of trade, whether internal or external can make up the slack.
We'll have a better idea how this is intended to work when the taverns appear in a release.
It reminds me of an entertaining discussion the writers had back in the days of Deep Space 9. Some were insisting that the Star Trek universe was post-capitalist and there was no money. "Well then," went the counterargument, "what are all of those people doing in the casino?"
There is not really a counter-argument since capitalism is not needed for their to be things of value to be gambled away and there are other things of value than money. For instance the players could really be gambling their own casino ration tokens instead of money. The casino could actually issue it's own internal 'currency' that functions simply as a measure of score and the best gambler can then 'purchase' himself a place in the Hall of Fame.
The tavern idea is directed at visiting outsiders, basically what we are doing is representing the Adventure Mode side of things in Fortress mode by having individual visiting outsiders come to your fortress and engage in commerce with your citizens and with eachother.
That is not in the paper I linked, though it does sum up the ultimate logical conclusion of "freshwater economics" which includes the "Chicago School." This particular paper was written at approximately the same time that economics-of-information was emerging as a field, and since that time we've come to understand a lot more about when and if someone would truthfully reveal their private information. Short answer: only when it's in their own interest to do so, and in those cases it's usually costly to signal the information in a credible way (for example, offering unconditional warranties to signal your product quality).
The basic premise of the Hayek paper I actually linked is what might be called an economic version of the Gaia Hypothesis, that changes in supply and demand can influence production decisions through prices (and stock-outs). Temples may have some role to play in smoothing out economic shocks (by accepting donations during gluts and giving things away during shortages), but it's tangential to their primary purpose in a fort.
I read the paper but little of it is actually true since supply and demand is actually transmitted by means other than prices, namely it is transmitted along the supply chain and prices are largely irrelavent to the whole process (basically things would work just as well if we had the supply chain but nothing was ever paid for). von-Hayak gets things backwards, people set prices according to what they think they know about the supply and demand. The actual process is not based upon be transmitting information about supply on demand but actually concealing the information that you have.
The seller knows that what he selling is common as dirt but he depends upon the buyer not knowing that it is, he bluffs up it's value on the basis of the buyer not knowing that it is common as dirt. If it becomes common knowledge that said thing is common as dirt then the buyer will instantly see through the deception, what matters is not the reality but the perception. All this means that in every sense those who actually take prices to transmit information are the losers, those who know the actual reality behind the prices are the winners.
The end result is the ordinery consumer typically loses hard due to not knowing very much and those who control as much of the supply chain as possible (ie supermarkets) tend to win, since they have the most complete set of information and rely least on the prices to determine the situation.
That's because the supply and demand considerations aren't in the game yet. And since trading skills will continue to affect prices, we won't have a happy utopian Coase Theorem world where everything is fair. Mostly because bringing fairness into DF would be unseemly :)
Dwarf Fortress is already next to perfectly equal and fair, the only thing remaining is to remove those lovely rooms the top nobles demand and then fairness will be 100%. 8) ;) :D
Supply and demand considerations are already in the game in relation to the player. You signal your demand for something by making a trade agreement with the mountainhome which ensures that given items are more likely to be present next time but also have a higher base price. You transmit information along the supply chain and based upon that information prices are set.
The AIs own demands of you are randomised I think but work on the same principle, the high demand is transmitted to you and you can set a higher price knowing this.
Not sure where you get the idea that no one would ever buy information, and even if you somehow thought that was implied, trading for information is specifically on the dev page.
I was just talking about how DF's planned statist economic development is not based upon von-Hayak. That is shown by how the information the merchants are buying is supply and demand directly rather than just the prices is a strong point of divergance from his theories, since in his theories they make decisions based upon prices.
Again, there are plenty of details outside the player's control that affect gameplay (at least for people paying attention) like grudges and assaults. Depending on the civ's relationship between church and state, the discovery of heretical religious materials might plop a crime into the justice system. Having the unsolved crime linger could cause stress.
The player could certainly hunt down the heretic, but it'd be fun to have some other alternatives. Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, does having the player order a shrine suddenly make that religion okay? Probably not. Would putting a heretic (known to the player but not the other citizens) in a position of authority soften views toward that religion "subliminally?" That would be interesting, especially given the risk of the heretic being unmasked before he/she has won acceptance for the religion... putting the faith in an even worse position than it was before.
The incentive to the player is to play along with heresy hunting to the very minimal degree that he has too. The incentive for the player is to hide all the heretics in the closet, not to expose them.
The same thing would presumably be the case for all the AI settlements throughout world-gen. Heresy hunting would starve to death because no government would find in their interests to encourage any religion to entertain such notions.
The government/player builds all the shrines, those who get the shrines are those who has the properties desirable to the government/player. It is not a case of building shrines making heretics acceptable but rather than nobody that believes in a concept like heresy-hunting would ever have been given any shrines in the first place.
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I do not know of any sources where Toady One promises to reintroduce the 'economy' in the old sense of a meta-feature plonked on top of the existing economy when the correct conditions are met. I believe that is just a rumour spread by fans of the old economy concept like yourself. What is the case however is that Toady One has plans to expand the existing economy by adding things like caravans travelling across the map and trading with travellers; both of these however are building on the existing system not reintroducing anything, caravans and fortresses trading with adventurers is already in the game.
That is way things are going, strangely specific ideas related to developing the existing economy brick by brick are how things are being done and not vague megaplans to reorganise Dwarf Fortress so it works in a way that von-Hayek can relate to.
The dev page mentions prices derived from supply and demand, and imperfect knowledge of prices elsewhere in the world. Sounds pretty Hayek-y.
I have found mention of Hayek in DF. The circle is complete; happiness is attained.
On the religion front, I imagine DF religion running very similar to most polytheist religions, where there are personal and social spheres of religious obligation. Personal focuses on individual devotion (ancestors, personal dealings with deities for personal matters, etc.) and does not impact the fortress as a whole. Personal religion is family-centered or individual, reflective, and private.
Social religion, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother show. Social religion is designed to make sure that the fabric of society is maintained, and as such, is public, demonstrative, and focused on the weal of the community. Generally featuring large temples and festivals, all members of the community are expected to partake in the social and religious rituals on a regular basis, with widely known, predefined roles such as festival sponsor, worshipper, priest, diviner, etc.
These two existed across the ancient world in most societies, and anything that forced a transition from one sphere to another (e.g., general conversion to Christianity forcing paganism underground, or the changing role of Ifa in colonial and post-colonial Yorubaland) creates massive amounts of social tension and dysfunction.
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I like the idea of the player being able to designate a shrine zone where religious dwarfs of all flavors congregate during downtime. A specific temple where a noble priest leads what ever form of religious worship the pantheon demands. And an alter that the player can build in a dwarfs room to imporve the happiness of very religious dwarfs.
I dont see why there should be a priest for each god in the dwavern pantheon though. Were only dealing with between 100 and 200 dwarfs having to deal with around 6 congregations would be a headache for the player.
I think it would be good if each pantheon had its own particular method of worship choosen at world gen. You could have some pantheons demand sacrifices, quiet contemplation, parties, preaching etc.
For sacrifices I think the dwarfs should automatically grab a vermin or their Own pet and sacrifice that. Otherwise for any lifestock killing or charcoal burning they must rely on the player.
Honestly having fire deities rain fire or some other magic sounds like it would diminish the gods into a sort of cosmic slot machine. I think having major blessing if they happen at all, be a once in a fort event would be much better. The benefit of a well tuned worship industry should be happier and more productive dwarfs.
However small unseen 2% or 3% bonuses for a particular farm plot or dwarf doesn't sound to gamey.
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I feel like it should just be implemented like rooms & quality.
Sure, having adequate bedroom for your dorfs is important, but it doesn't make them go mad because ththey're the starting seven and they haven't dug out their own bedrooms yet.
Also, GC, Dirst, calm thyselves. Textwalls help no-one, and serve only to make you sound angry and pedantic, which I suspect is the opposite of your intent. A rational argument is all well and good, but that much rational argument is breaking my poor android. :p
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I kinda liked the sancturay idea in the starting post... but maybe on a social level?
As in, convicted dwarves can claim sanctuary in the temple, and people get angry if you/ you can't/ religious dwarves won't drag him away.
This would be useful for adventure mode, while still creating interesting and tense social situations in Dwarf Fortress, in a more mundane, less annoying or supernaturally cheesy way.
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So, what about procedural generation?
Rituals would be easy enough. Some combination of poetry, dance, self-reflection, and sacrifice. They could also require some furniture item to conduct rituals at. An altar could simply be a table adorned with an image of the god. For balance, rituals with fewer participants would have fewer requirements. I'll get to that later
A ritual of cleansing practiced by the Spawn of Mothra. The ritual is conducted at the first quarter moon. The ritual is lead by a pastor of the Spawn of Mothra and multiple acolytes of the Spawn of Mothra. The ritual takes place at statue of Dagahra. The ritual is accompanied by a [religious musical form]. The ritual begins with meditation. Then the worshipers are annoined by the acolytes with a mixture of gnomeblight and black sand. Finally, the pastor gelds a dog while the worshipers and the acolytes dance a [religious dance form].
Religions would be procedurally generated to worship a single god, multiple gods within a pantheon, or the entire pantheon. Each religion would generate priestly positions to conduct and teach rituals. These positions are automatically created if the number of followers of a religion reach a certain threshold, defined by the position. Priests would make demands for items required for the rituals they know. If the ritual takes place without the items, all participants get a bad thought.
Priests would also demand to know more of their religion's rituals. Eventually, this would lead to the priest knowing all of the rituals of his or her religion. This allows for the evolution of a frontier church into a grand center of worship.
Temples could be dedicated to a specific god, a specific religion, a the gods of a specific sphere, an entire pantheon, or general worship. If a religion gets big enough, the priest will demand a temple. If it gets even bigger, the priest will demand a temple for specific gods of the religion (doesn't apply if only one is worshiped).
If persons of other faiths witness a ritual, they would have thoughts about it according to their personality traits, and could be disgusted or converted by the display. Faith could also be spread by conversations among friends.
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In an early fortress, dwarves would have few bad thoughts about missed rituals, because they could conduct most of the smaller ones without materials. Once enough dwarves are around to conduct the larger rituals, the fortress will be developed enough to supply the necessary materials. It may get a bit wonky if your starting seven have the same religion, but you could just pretend they were pilgrims.
Edit:
All rituals should only use materials available to the parent civilization and in relatively small quantities, so it would be quite simple to get by trade.
Also, managing 10 temples for 6 religions would be quite simple. Chuck a statue or a slab in a 5x5 room and call it a day. Simply [q]uery them to find out whom they are dedicated to and whom they belong to. The priests will take care of the ritual demands.
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I like the idea of procedurally generated rituals for everything. There should probably also be the potential for long-term practices too- not just short-ish things where they pray, and prostrate, and contemplate, and pray some more- but really long-term rituals/practices like the "ever burning flame" that had to be tended to in many fire/light god religions. (Most obviously, the pyre in the Olympic Games.) The kinds of things that would force special requirements on a sufficiently spiritual fort and cause mass panic and rage in the faithful should the practices be interrupted.
I'm thinking of several versions of long term rituals:
- The previously mentioned "ever burning flame", in which ever major temple must have a constantly burning fire resulting in a significant drain on wood, coal, and other flammables as priests snatch good to keep it lit. Further challenges would include making sure the temples were properly ventilated and fire-proof before the embers from an older "Eternal Flame" are introduced to the temple, and maintaining order if the fire is put out for whatever reason.
- A "Sacred Beast", in which one creature in particular is regarded to be either a messenger or the embodiment of a particular god, this could mesh fairly seamlessly with the preexisting circumstance of megabeasts posing as gods. Requirements would be keeping the selected creature alive and encouraging it to breed as much as possible. It could be pretty challenging if your fort's main religion is centered on a grazing animal and you don't have many pastures that could contain it.
- Enshrinement of "Relics", objects or remains that once belonged to important historical figures- which now and forever must be found and kept safe within special religious structures. Fairly easy to just seal them in a room and forget about it, as far as fort difficulty goes; but relics should be huge targets to bandits and sapient monsters, so transporting relics between shrines should be extremely dangerous if not kept quiet and successfully retrieving a lost relic should be about the same level as slaying a dragon in terms of glory for adventurers.
- Witch Doctors/Oracles/Shaman, a special type of priest, that must be constantly kept in a "trance". Trances might be induced through a number of ways, from hallucinogenic incense to meditation in extreme conditions. Shaman would be a form of noblilty, that other worshipers consulted with for spiritual guidance, they might also provide a source of holy quests for adventurers. Difficulty may vary, as a trance requiring extreme heat would be as easy to fulfill as finding magma, but a trance brought about with the fumes of burning glumprong shavings might mean braving a reanimating biome every year or two.
There's probably way more things that could work like this, but it's all I could think of.
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I was thinking rituals should be short term events that would be easy to include within the (soon to be) existing framework, so I am hesitant at the notion of having these ideas under the "ritual" umbrella.
However, no religion would be complete without laws and directives. A new umbrella is in order.
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Practices would be a set of requirements and restrictions that a believer adheres to. They, like song, dance, and rituals, would be spread through the knowledge system and it is the priests responsibility to teach the faithful. Possibilities include sacred or unclean animals, vegetables, and minerals; specific garments or ornaments; and forbidden jobs, all with a possible temporal component.
For ease of programming and comprehension, practices should be all be negative ("don't do this"). Even requirements to wear specific clothes should be considered this way ("never stop wearing your socks"). This is in contrast to rituals, which are strictly positive ("do this").
For balance and realism, an individual's adherence to practices are dependent on the individual's personality traits and the adherence of other individuals to the practice (including those outside of the faith). This will lead to an all-or-nothing deal, with small or diverse forts rarely adhering to practices and large or homogeneous forts often adhering to them.
In order to generate self-consistent rituals and practices, religions should generate a set of sacred and unclean objects to use in rituals. These objects must be available to the entity that founds the religion.
In case more !!fun!! is required, religious individuals (mainly nobles) may wish to impose practices onto others. Normally this would only cause a few problems (perhaps if a dwarf's favorite beer is banned), but if a ritual of a different religion requires the donning of a banned garment, there could be resentment towards those who mandated the practice. If this happens too much, there could be spirals in the future.
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Looking back, this practices framework only covers one of LMeire's ideas.
Possible solutions to the other 3:
1) Have an ever-burning flame be associated with a temple. Perhaps when the noble priest demands the temple, he or she could demand some specific furniture to be placed inside before satisfied.
3) According to the randomly generated values of the priest, he could mandate expeditions to retrieve the artifacts. This should be very simple with the World-Gen Artifact framework.
4) When a religious noble is randomly generated, one of the options may be a required ritual every so often.
To sum up ideas so far:
* Religions are dedicated to a random subset of gods within a pantheon
* Religions randomly choose objects available to the parent entity to be sacred or unclean
* Rituals (positive) and Practices (negative) are procedurally generated pieces of knowledge associated with a single religion
* Rituals are group actions that often require specific materials or locations
* Practices are sets of banned actions
* Religious nobles are associated with a single religion and exist to spread the knowledge of Rituals and Practices, conduct rituals, and make demands on the behalf of the religion
* Religious nobles may have procedural elements to differentiate religions
* Religious noble positions are automatically created and filled for a fortress with a high enough population of a single religion
* Temples can be dedicated to a single god, a single religion, the gods of a specific sphere, an entire pantheon, or general worship
* As a religion grows, religious nobles will demand a temple dedicated specifically to their religion, and later, to individual gods of that religion
* Temples must have specific furniture before the religious nobles are satisfied
* Religious nobles will demand materials associated with rituals
* Particularly faithful nobles may impose practices on others
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I was thinking rituals should be short term events that would be easy to include within the (soon to be) existing framework, so I am hesitant at the notion of having these ideas under the "ritual" umbrella.
However, no religion would be complete without laws and directives. A new umbrella is in order.
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Practices would be a set of requirements and restrictions that a believer adheres to. They, like song, dance, and rituals, would be spread through the knowledge system and it is the priests responsibility to teach the faithful. Possibilities include sacred or unclean animals, vegetables, and minerals; specific garments or ornaments; and forbidden jobs, all with a possible temporal component.
For ease of programming and comprehension, practices should be all be negative ("don't do this"). Even requirements to wear specific clothes should be considered this way ("never stop wearing your socks"). This is in contrast to rituals, which are strictly positive ("do this").
For balance and realism, an individual's adherence to practices are dependent on the individual's personality traits and the adherence of other individuals to the practice (including those outside of the faith). This will lead to an all-or-nothing deal, with small or diverse forts rarely adhering to practices and large or homogeneous forts often adhering to them.
In order to generate self-consistent rituals and practices, religions should generate a set of sacred and unclean objects to use in rituals. These objects must be available to the entity that founds the religion.
In case more !!fun!! is required, religious individuals (mainly nobles) may wish to impose practices onto others. Normally this would only cause a few problems (perhaps if a dwarf's favorite beer is banned), but if a ritual of a different religion requires the donning of a banned garment, there could be resentment towards those who mandated the practice. If this happens too much, there could be spirals in the future.
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Looking back, this practices framework only covers one of LMeire's ideas.
Possible solutions to the other 3:
1) Have an ever-burning flame be associated with a temple. Perhaps when the noble priest demands the temple, he or she could demand some specific furniture to be placed inside before satisfied.
3) According to the randomly generated values of the priest, he could mandate expeditions to retrieve the artifacts. This should be very simple with the World-Gen Artifact framework.
4) When a religious noble is randomly generated, one of the options may be a required ritual every so often.
To sum up ideas so far:
* Religions are dedicated to a random subset of gods within a pantheon
* Religions randomly choose objects available to the parent entity to be sacred or unclean
* Rituals (positive) and Practices (negative) are procedurally generated pieces of knowledge associated with a single religion
* Rituals are group actions that often require specific materials or locations
* Practices are sets of banned actions
* Religious nobles are associated with a single religion and exist to spread the knowledge of Rituals and Practices, conduct rituals, and make demands on the behalf of the religion
* Religious nobles may have procedural elements to differentiate religions
* Religious noble positions are automatically created and filled for a fortress with a high enough population of a single religion
* Temples can be dedicated to a single god, a single religion, the gods of a specific sphere, an entire pantheon, or general worship
* As a religion grows, religious nobles will demand a temple dedicated specifically to their religion, and later, to individual gods of that religion
* Temples must have specific furniture before the religious nobles are satisfied
* Religious nobles will demand materials associated with rituals
* Particularly faithful nobles may impose practices on others
Then of course.... the *PURGE ALL NON-BELIEVERS* demand.
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Even better if, when a tantruming dwarf breaks the temple, the gods curse them and they turn into a vampire/werebeast.
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Even better if, when a tantruming dwarf breaks the temple, the gods curse them and they turn into a vampire/werebeast.
Do they transform immediately into beast form? :o
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Even better if, when a tantruming dwarf breaks the temple, the gods curse them and they turn into a vampire/werebeast.
Do they transform immediately into beast form? :o
Presumably one becomes cursed immediately. For a vampire, this has an immediate effect. The werebeast might think she got away without punishment.
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They could also get plagued with FB-like syndromes.
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Haven't read everything, so this might have already been suggested, but I think it would be pretty cool if when say a city following their religion had been captured elsewhere in the world, very devout members of that religion would gather, trade away stuff in their temple for equipment and go off on a crusade to take back the city, which would give extra reason for players to get involved in religious affairs, for better or for worse.
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Haven't read everything, so this might have already been suggested, but I think it would be pretty cool if when say a city following their religion had been captured elsewhere in the world, very devout members of that religion would gather, trade away stuff in their temple for equipment and go off on a crusade to take back the city, which would give extra reason for players to get involved in religious affairs, for better or for worse.
I like the idea of religion and other kinds of faction-based "international affairs" but be aware that the word crusade itself is radioactive for any game that aspires to an international audience. Going off to "rescue their brethren" and such should be fine.
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Yeah worldwide faction based conflict would be interesting, especially when, if I understood well, philosophy will soon be added, so we can have clashing political ideologies drawing in fighters from the whole world, Spanish civil war style.
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It'd be interesting to see rituals and shrines/altars/temples affected by game events, at least cosmetically. Stuff like this:
Urist McUberReligious has given birth!
The flame in the temple of the god of birth grows hotter and almost consumes the temple!
...
Urist McHunter has been missing for a week.
The bones in the shrine of the goddess of death rattle.
...
And it could also affect rituals too, say, a priest is gutting the heart out of a goat in a ritual for the peace god, and instead of a heart, he pulls out a lump of coal. Not too long after, a seige arrives. The lump of coal was because there was an army marching towards your fort. Or, maybe, instead of this, you could Q certain shrines and it would say "The ___ appears to have ____" or "a ____ feeling can be felt here". Of course, the occurrences could be either (a) very rare or (b) usually nonsense, depending on the given god's activity level and clairvoyance. I think this would give the players a good reason to pay more attention to their fort.